Jonathan Raban: Foreign Land: A Novel

The Curaçaoan tanker St Willebrordus was still on discharge in Number One. George could see the insect swarm of stevedores on the quay, and he felt widowed by the sight. But Raymond Luis had to learn to handle things on his own. There were five weeks left. George saw them as one might view the dismal, far too brief remission of an illness: he dreaded this reckoning with the small pains and indignities that went with letting go. He still hadn’t faced up to it, even though it had been nearly a year since the President had smilingly picked up his stone. Home, George.

He turned into the courtyard of the Club Nautico. Teddy, already in his squash kit, was waiting for him.

“Sorry, Teddy,” George said. “Am I late?”

Eduardo Duarte, who had lived in the United States and made even the President of the Republic call him Teddy, after Mr Kennedy, made a show of inspecting his wristwatch-cum-electronic calculator. “Eleven minutes,” he said. As Minister of Communications, he was a stickler for timetables. “You have time for one drink. What do you want? A Chivas Regal?”

“No thanks,” George said. “I’ll go and change.” Teddy himself drank nothing but a Vitamin C cocktail called Sun Top which he puritanically sucked through a straw; he always tried to make George start the evening with a slug of Scotch in the hope of slowing up his game.

“I got a confession to make, George. I feel real good tonight. And I am going to hit the hot shit out of you, baby.”

“Oh, yes?” said George. “You and whose sister?” Cheered, he went off to the changing room. In singlet and shorts, he replaced his Holsum cap and took a secret nip from the bottle in his shopping bag.

After Independence, there were very few yachtsmen left in Montedor, and the Club Nautico was well on its way to becoming a draughty ruin. The club notice board still had the 1974 regatta results pinned to it. They were illegible. Red dust blew around the floors of the high vaulted rooms. Red dust had settled on the imitation Louis Quinze furniture and worked its way deep into the leaky leather armchairs. At weekends, the staff of the foreign consulates used the club as a base for their dinghy cruises to the islands; but on most weekdays it was left to the cockroaches and the house skinks, and to the Armenian barman who himself resembled a large domestic reptile in his greasy tailcoat.

Now the Armenian was stirring the dust on the cement floor of the squash court with a broom made of palm fronds.

“Is good now?” he said to George.

“Fine,” said George, raising a tiny desert storm round his ankles.

“Okay, George,” Teddy said, “ready for your lumps?”

His game was fast and flashy. Twenty years younger and a full foot shorter than George, he had been toughened by five years of athletic stuff in the mountains, where he’d been a PAIM guerrilla. On the squash court, though, it was George who was the guerrilla. He knew the jagged cracks in the wall where the spiders lived, the bulges of dry rot, the useful fist-sized crater caused by a stray bullet in ’75. He aimed at every deformity he could reach; and when his luck was in, he could bring the ball back off the front wall at a variety of perverse tangents.

The two men grunted and spat. Their plimsolls squeaked on the cement. The ball made noises generally confined to the balloons in comics: wham! thwack! pow! blatt!

“Sonofabitch!” said Teddy.

Pee-oung! splat! whang! fupp!

“Oh, kiss my ass, George—”

Teddy pranced, sprang, dived, stretched, jack-knifed, like a hooked tuna, while George husbanded his wind. Sweat was dripping into his eyes, and the back of his singlet was soaked through. What kind of a fool goes in for this young man’s game at sixty?

He heard Ferraz gloating somewhere out in the suburban outskirts of his brain. He smashed a winner specially for the doctor. If you don’t think about it, it won’t happen .

“Oh, motherfucker!”

George, probing for the crater in the front wall, was a late, refined specimen of West Coast Man. The region had created its own system of natural selection, and George had the right genes. Eighty years ago, when malaria and haematuric fevers had made quick work of putting Europeans through their African entrance exam, it had been the fat men who died first. Their ships put in to Lagos, Dakar and Bom Porto, and the fat men went out on the town. They had just enough time to write their first letter home before the shivers started. Then they passed blood in their urine. In a fortnight, maybe three weeks, they were dead. The mattresses they left behind were so sopping with perspiration that they had to be left out in the sun for two days before they could be burned.

The fat men were buried in long columns in the cemetery on the hill over the bay: American whaling captains, Portuguese army lieutenants, English cocoa merchants, French mineral prospectors. But the thin men toughed it out. On the Coast, the branco or toubob (in the Wolof interior) was an attenuated, ectomorphic specimen who left the tallest locals somewhere down around his chest and shoulders. George, at six foot four, was all knuckles, knees and elbows. Any self-respecting mosquito would have scorned him as a poor ship’s biscuit of a dinner, and helicoptered off in search of something fleshier.

Zapp! Pause. Whock! Longer pause. Flam! George was working on Teddy’s backhand down the side wall.

“Scumbag!”

George had always been impressed by Teddy’s command of American vernacular. It seemed a lot to have brought back from two years at the Business School of the University of Wisconsin. Teddy, referring to his alma mater, called it Bizz-Wizz. George suspected Teddy of having made it up, just as he suspected that many of Teddy’s more colourful American obscenities might have raised blank looks if voiced anywhere within the United States. Did anyone really say—

“Diddly-shitting corn-hole!”?

George found it hard to believe so, and directed the ball at a soggy patch, and missed, and lost the point, but won the game a minute later.

“Teddy — what can I get you?”

Laughing, turbaning his head in a striped towel, the Minister of Communications said: “Me? I’ll sink a Sun Top. Make it two.”

George’s legs felt rubbery. Victory always left him weaker than defeat; and for the last month he’d been on a winning streak. It had started on the day he learned from Vera that she and Teddy had shared a room at the Luanda Mar hotel at the congress in Angola where Vera had been Health and Teddy had been Transport. The two words were altogether too expressive for comfort. That wasn’t the first time, apparently, nor, George assumed sadly, had it been the last. Now, wobbling slightly as he made his way to the bar, George very much hoped that it was a new vein of pugnacity on his part that made him win, and not embarrassment on Teddy’s that obliged him to lose.

The Armenian already had the dusty bottle of Chivas Regal waiting for him. “Is good?” He showed his set of very white and very loose false teeth. They had probably been bought on mail-order.

“Yes,” George said, “that’s the one.” He was used to thinking of the barman as a relic left over from Montedor’s colonial heyday. In fact, only the shrunken jaw of the man was really old; the rest of his face was lightly lined and there was still black in his hair. He and George, two foreigners in a foreign land, were coevals. It was a nasty thought, and he strangled it as soon as it was born, spoiling the Scotch with a long splash of desalinated water.

Teddy, sprawled in a chair, bare legs wide, his face framed in the towel like a woman’s after a bath, said: “You went to Guia. That’s one helluva drive.”