William Boyd - A Good Man in Africa

Afterwards, he found he could still taste the Fanshawes’ sherry in his mouth for some reason, and had sent a protesting Hazel out for some more beer to wash it away. ‘If you hadn’t given it to bloody Sonny-boy you wouldn’t have to go, would you?’ he had satisfyingly rebuked her.

While she was away he had decided to run a bath. This simple act was equally unreliable and ridden with pitfalls. He turned on the cold tap and for a full minute all he heard was a muted whistle of air, then the tap juddered, gave a couple of metallic snorts and a low-pressure stream haltingly flowed out for a while, filling the bath with two inches of water, before it was reduced to an ineffectual dribble. Morgan carefully lowered his sweaty body into this, gasping as his genitals were immersed. He soaped himself as best he could and splashed the lather off. Hazel brought him his beer and he sat for ten minutes or so in the bath sipping direct from the bottle. Presently a benign alcoholic haze began to fog all his undesirable memories. He turned on the tap again, found the pressure had built up and washed his hair.

When he stepped out of the bath he saw Hazel sitting in her bra and pants painting her fingernails. Morgan drained his beer bottle. There were two good things about living in Africa, he told himself convivially: just two. Beer and sex. Sex and beer. He wasn’t sure in what order he’d place them — he was indifferent really — but they were the only things in his life that didn’t consistently let him down. They sometimes did, but not in the randomly cruel and arbitrary way that the other features of the world conspired to confuse and frustrate him. They were as reliable as anything in this dreadful country, he thought, and, he reflected smugly, feeling more buoyant and pleased with himself all of a sudden, he was certainly getting enough of both.

He dried himself leisurely. Hazel had switched on her transistor radio and low monotonous soul-music issued from the crackling loud-speaker. Morgan thought about ordering it silenced but decided to be obliging and refrain. Hazel was reliable too, he thought kindly: well, almost, in her own bizarre way. He was grateful to her.

Standing rigidly to attention and craning his head forward Morgan could just see the tip of his penis beyond the burgeoning swell of his pot-belly. Beer and sex, he thought. When he couldn’t see it any more he’d go on a diet. He continued to pass the towel regularly over his body but it was no longer having any effect: he wasn’t wet exactly, but remained distinctly moist. He padded through to the bedroom and stood in front of the standard fan. He took a large tin of talcum powder from Hazel’s crowded dressing table and liberally dusted his armpits and groin. When his pubic hairs had turned a ghostly white he pulled on his underpants — pale blue billowing boxer shorts. This had been another of Murray’s recommendations. There was the man again, Morgan seethed, but he had to admit it made sense, and it was comfortable. Kin-janja’s humid clime was not suited for tight, genital-bunching hipster briefs: you had to let the air get to those dark dank places.

He caught a glimpse of a section of his torso in Hazel’s dressing-table mirror. Fat lapped over the waist band of his boxer shorts. He was particularly distressed by the two pads that had seemingly clamped themselves immovably to his back — like tenacious alien parasites — in the region of his kidneys. He was getting too large: fifteen and a half stone at the last weigh-in. He winced at the memory. He had always been on the biggish side; in his beefy adolescence his mother had tactfully described him as ‘big-boned’, though ‘burly’ was how he now liked to see himself. He was of average height, around five foot nine or ten, and had always cut a stocky figure but in his getting-on-for-three years in Nkongsamba he had put on almost two stones and his silhouette seemed to bulk larger every week.

He crouched down and peered over Hazel’s shoulder at his face in the mirror. He fingered his jaw-line. Christ, he thought with some alarm, the bone is half an inch below the surface. He stretched his neck from side to side, turning his head and squinting at his profile. He had a broad face, it could carry the extra flesh not too badly, he reckoned. He smiled at himself, his strong smile, showing all his teeth. There was something vaguely Brandoish about him, he felt. Hazel looked up from her nail painting, thought he was smiling at her and smiled back.

Standing up he inflated his chest, sucked in his gut and flexed his buttocks. He didn’t really look thirty-four, he decided, that is, if you ignored his hair. His hair was the bane of his life: it was fine and wispy, pale reddish-brown and falling out. His temples took over more of his head every month. Somehow his widow’s peak held on, a hirsute promontory in an expanding sea of forehead. If his bloody receding didn’t stop soon, he reflected, he’d end up looking like a Huron Indian or one of those demented American Marines, currently wasting the inhabitants of South — East Asia, who shaved their heads leaving only a prickly stripe running down the centre. Gently, with all ten finger tips, he teased the soft hair across his brow: it was too sad really.

Back in his clothes he returned his attention to Hazel. She was spending a long time preparing herself for something, and it wasn’t for him. He looked around the room and its tawdriness set his spirits in the now familiar slide: the frame metal bed with its thin dunlopillo mattress, the cheap local furnishings, the bright ceiling light with its buzzing corona of flying insects and Hazel’s garish mini-skirts and shifts cast around the room as haphazardly as seaweed on a beach.

‘Can’t you keep this bloody place tidy?’ he said complain-ingly. Then: ‘And where are you going tonight?’

Hazel was struggling into a tight pink cotton mini-dress and she was wobbly on high-heeled patent-leather shoes. ‘I can’t stay here all night,’ she said, not unreasonably. ‘I am going to the Executive. Josy Gboye is starring there.’

Morgan laughed sardonically.’

‘Oh yeah? And I suppose you’re going alone.’

Hazel adjusted her wig, a heavily back-combed straight-haired black one modelled after the hair style of a British pop-singer. ‘Of course not,’ she said simply, ‘I am going with my brother.’ She fastened on her gold earrings. Morgan thought she looked like a tart, lurid and sexual, and deeply attractive. He realized he was jealous; he would have liked to be going to the Executive with her, but it functioned as an unofficial campaign headquarters for Adekunle’s party workers, and it would not be wise for him to be spotted there with the elections just a week away. Besides, the last person in the world he wanted to see at the moment was Adekunle. The barbecue at the club would be safer: safe and dull.

Hazel saw his smouldering look and came over to him. She put her arms round his waist.

‘I want to go with you,’ she said, nuzzling his chest. The stiff nylon hairs of the wig tickled Morgan’s nose making him want to sneeze. ‘But if you won’t allow me, what can I do?’

Confronted by this logic he decided to be unreasonable.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘All right. But be back here by 10:30. I think I’ll look in later.’ He thought this highly improbable but he didn’t like being taken for granted.

He bent down and touched his lips to her neck. Her skin was smooth and dry. He smelt ‘Amby’—a skin lightening agent most Kinjanjan girls used — talcum powder and a thin acidic whiffoffresh perspiration. He suddenly felt very aroused. He never failed to register amazement at the swiftness of his erections — and their subsidence — in Africa. He pressed himself against Hazel, and she backed off laughing, her almond eyes creased thinner with amusement. She gave her infectious, high-pitched laugh.