Читать книгу My Name is N - Robert Karjel - Страница 14

I left Heike sleeping and took a taxi into the Jonquet at midnight. I found the L’ouistiti in front of the taxi rank to Parakou. The bar left you in no doubt as to its intentions. Even the name, to my ear, had a girlie mag, fluffy bra, stripper’s pout to it.

The building’s plasterwork was as flaking and pitted as an old doxy’s make-up and, rather than redo it, they’d just slapped some blue paint on top – gloss, as if that would make it better. Now the paint had started coming off in dermatological skeins so that ‘scabby’ was not being unfair. The lighting, beyond the plastic strips of the fly curtain, was red and sore as if the room had been chafed raw. The girls standing in the rasping light, who weren’t hitting on customers yet, had their smiles up on the shelf with the bottles of grog. They were neither drinking nor smoking. They were talking amongst themselves but not chit-chat. It looked more medicinal than that.

I’d hardly got my leg over the back of the moped when my arms were taken up by a girl on either side, so that trying to pay the driver left me in an Olympic wrestling hold requiring a knot expert. They bundled me towards the entrance. The bar was narrow and stretched a long way back and looked intestinal in the light, the few punters inside ulcerating against the walls.

A sailor type was slumped across two high-backed wooden chairs, leaning on an elbow, his face sweating, his eyes tearful and his Adam’s apple working overtime swallowing bad memories. A girl had a hand in his pocket, massaging his wad. My two girls tried to steer me in there next to him but I sailed on past, heading to the back of the place where there was a big guy sitting on a high stool next to a door. He had to be stoned, the way he was sitting, both legs hanging off the stool, his body doubled over, an elbow on one knee and his head floating in his hand like a nodding dog. He straightened when I hove into his tunnel vision.

‘Charbonnier?’ I asked.

The guy’s lids, heavier than obols, stayed at half mast, so I leaned in on him and gave it to him louder in his ear. He reached over to the door with the speed of a hog-filled anaconda and rapped on it twice, finishing with a flourish and a how-about-that look. I wouldn’t have minded giving him a how-about-this elbow in his what-the-hell mouth, but one of the girls had started work rubbing my already sore penis and I shrugged the two of them off.

Inside there was a small-boned Beninois fellow with an accounts book and a calculator in front of him. He stuck a pen behind his ear and folded his arms.

‘Le blanc? Il est dedans?’ I asked.

He nodded. All these guys had been to some French waiters’ school.

‘Je veux le voir,’ I said

He leaned back and pressed a button on the wall, speedier than his friend. A door buzzed open. A pair of hands was sitting behind a desk. The hands, in a cone of light, were arranging a line of grass on three cigarette papers stuck together. The owner of the hands was in the dark and it took time to get used to the contrast and pick him out and when I did he still hadn’t adjusted the astonishment out of his face.

‘Hi, Jacques,’ I said, getting it quicker than usual.

‘What the fuck are you…?’

‘I got lucky,’ I said. ‘Want me to call you Michel now?’

‘Take a seat,’ he said, going back to his work. ‘I hope you smoke.’

‘I gave up.’

‘Tobacco?’ he asked. ‘There’s no tobacco in this.’

He started to roll the monster spliff which was his bulkhead against a long night of Christ knows what nastiness he had raking through his brain. I took the seat in the hot room across from him, my back to an open netted window. The glow from the desk lamp picked up his thin face, a worn and sweating face that was lined in a way that meant he sneered a lot…probably at himself in the mirror of a morning if he could bear it. He’d lost most of his hair, apart from a few strands he’d combed over the creamy whiteness of his pate. He had a tan line across his forehead from wearing a hat, a Panama that was hanging on the wall behind him.

While he finessed the joint I found my gaze locked on to a framed line drawing on the wall which I thought was a still life of a bowl of fruit, but on closer inspection proved to be an Oriental woman weighing a pair of huge balls and about to fellate an impossibly large cock.

‘That one gets the girls every time,’ he said.

‘On the first train out of here?’

‘You’d be surprised,’ he said, and licked the papers to his joint with a very red and glistening tongue that didn’t look as if it could mind its own business for very long. He smoothed off the spliff and put a twist in the end. He tore a strip off a Marlboro packet, roached it and sat back to admire the craftsmanship.

‘So what brings you to me, M. Medway?’

‘I thought we could have a chat about a mutual friend.’

‘Jean-Luc? No. I don’t talk about Jean-Luc. You think of something else.’

The sweat stood out on his forehead and I felt my own runnelling down my spine.

‘It’s hot in here.’

‘The air con’s broken. It’s going to rain.’

He lit the joint, puffing at it to get it going, and then took a huge drag and held it in for so long he squeaked. He let the smoke out slowly and repeated. His eyes glazed and his face softened to a concentrated luxuriousness.

‘You don’t happen to have any whisky?’

He opened a cabinet, poured me a shot of something and handed over the glass.

‘If you want to talk, you have to smoke as well.’

‘Too paranoid?’ I said.

He leaned over and bug-eyed me.

‘Who?’ he said, and smiled with as close to a good nature as he could get without borrowing a Ronald Reagan mask.

‘Maybe that stuff’s good for you,’ I said. ‘Smoothes you out. Stops your nerves jangling in your ears.’

‘In my ears?’ he asked, nicely stoned now.

‘Whatever.’

‘Smoke,’ he ordered, and held out the reefer.

I took a tentative drag and didn’t cough my heels up. All the pollution I’d been breathing had taken the virginity off my lungs.

‘Enjoy,’ he said. ‘There’s not much else around here.’

I nodded at his porno drawing and took another quarter drag from the joint, not wanting to get wrecked in the first minute and waste my time here.

‘Not here, M. Medway. Not in Africa. There’s plenty of girls to fuck, but, you know how it is for them, fucking the white man c’est comme un travail de ménage.’

‘You shouldn’t knock yourself like that, Michel.’

‘Knock myself?’ he asked, rapping his head.

‘Tu ne dois pas dire du mal de toi-même,’ I said. ‘There’s plenty of other people around who’ll do it for you.’

He grunted and leaned back in his chair.

‘You need to smoke some more, M. Medway. Take it in…deep.’

‘Marnier,’ I said, sipping the whisky, the strong flavour of the grass like a hay espresso in my mouth. ‘Tell me about Marnier. Why do you have to do little jobs for him? Especially when you don’t like doing them for him…do you?’

‘I have no choice.’

‘What’s he going to do to you if you don’t?’ I asked. ‘Kill you?’

‘Kill me. Pah!’ he roared, and rocked back on his wooden chair. He fought his feet out from under the desk and put them up on an unopened ream of paper he had sitting next to the phone. He was wearing dirty white plimsolls with no laces. He drew a hand down his gaunt features, picking up some sweat on the way which he wiped on to the thigh of a pair of grey cotton trousers which had been pounded that colour by an African washerwoman. ‘What would he get out of killing me?’

‘I wasn’t being serious.’

‘Smoke some more.’

I took a longer drag on the reefer, which seemed to satisfy him. I fitted the joint between his fuck-you fingers and he nestled back into his chair.

‘The only reason I’m living is because of Jean-Luc. So why would he want to kill me?’

‘I didn’t say he would.’

‘Non?’

The dope was ungluing the conversation fast. A warm glow emanated from my stomach which was being fuelled by my extremities which felt like frozen chicken parts. My eyeballs prickled. My tongue was lilo size and dry and musty like sun-scorched canvas. The whisky added no lick to my mouth. The silence I was in now felt long and ruminative of such things as the wood grain in Charbonnier’s desk, the two missing eyelets in his plimsolls and the crepey quality of the skin on the back of his hands.

‘How did Jean-Luc get cut up?’ I asked, after a small century of chair creaking.

‘Uhn?’ said Michael, resettling himself and tilting back in his captain’s chair. I repeated the question. Time leaked through my fingers.

‘Sierra Leone,’ said Michel, while I tried to remember the question. He handed back the joint. I waved it away. He insisted.

‘What happened in Sierra Leone?’ I asked, the smoke leaking out of me everywhere, the corners of my eyes, my knuckle joints. ‘What was he doing there?’

‘Buying diamonds,’ he said, from what seemed a long way off now.

He eased the joint out of the back of my hand, which was no longer mine, but lay quietly on the desk top ready to be put on.