A Darkening Stain

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘A woman called Gifty.’

  ‘That was in the restaurant.’

  ‘I told him I was going to be a father. He told me about his children who he doesn’t see any more. We talked about unconditional love.’

  ‘Don’t talk to Franconelli about unconditional love.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s not his line of sensibility. He’s a football man.’

  ‘Franconelli’s wife died in a truck crash, his daughter died of malaria. He might be ruthless but he’s...’

  ‘Sentimental too ... like me.’

  ‘So we talked about unconditional love, about his wife, his kids and how she turned them against him because he was a man of violence.’

  ‘Calmes-toi.’

  ‘We talked about my father, deathbed advice, how the English don’t know anything about women and the French do.’

  ‘We do. I think we do.’

  ‘We talked about acting.’

  ‘No, you didn’t. Franconelli is not subtle. You’ll only set him thinking.’

  ‘Then he said he was tired. I told him I’d go back to the bar. He asked me if it was the waitress. I said no. Then I went and had the drink with the waitress. She was English, called Adèle. She had red hair, corkscrew ringlets, freckles on her face and the top of her breasts, green eyes.’

  ‘You see?’ said Marnier. ‘I know you.’

  ‘She was wearing a purple silk shirt, no bra, cut-off denims, leather sandals. She was sitting at a table when I arrived, with a beer and a cigarette watching some Australians playing with petrol bombs in a beach bonfire. I ordered a beer and watched with her until the Australians got bored and went in to start the disco. We talked about England. Not much. She’d been travelling for more than a year and I haven’t seen the place for more than five. We talked about crossing the Sahara, the space out there, about time...’

  ‘Don’t talk too much shit, Bruce. Franconelli’s like any guy. He wants the juice.’

  ‘This is important. We talked about the ground.’

  ‘The ground. Vraiment les anglais. It’s a miracle you do it any more.’

  ‘We talked about the ground. The African ground. How the earth has its own pulse...’

  ‘Ça c’est bon,’ said Marnier. ‘I can see where you’re going now.’

  ‘Then we bought a couple of bottles of beer and walked down the beach. A long walk beyond the hotel and campsite until it was just the sea and the palm trees. When it was completely dark we took our clothes off and swam in the sea. Then we started playing and we were holding on to each other and then we were kissing.’

  ‘You don’t like Hemingway, do you?’

  ‘He’s OK.’

  ‘I don’t want any of this “the earth moved” shit. I want everything. And when you’ve had her on the beach I want you to take her back to her room and have her again ... with the light on so I can see everything clearly. I want those pictures clear in my head.’

  ‘Whose lie is this, Jean-Luc?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘We got out of the water...’

  ‘I just want to be sure, Bruce, that you will be doing it more than once. Because you know how it is with a new woman, you don’t just fall asleep after the first time. You do it again and again and again until you can’t...’

  ‘Calmes-toi, Fean-Lue.’

  He settled back down and closed his eyes.

  ‘Fe suis calme, maintenant.’

  I told Marnier how we came out of the sea locked together, how I’d fallen and she’d got astride me and reached behind her and taken hold of my penis and slotted it into her. Then she hadn’t moved, only her nipples, swollen to raspberries, trembled. She’d held herself above me with just the head of my penis inside her incredible warm wetness until I was shouting at her. Then she’d slammed herself down time and again, her cool buttocks slapping my thighs, her pubis grinding into mine, until we both came loud enough to turn heads in the campsite.

  ‘Excellent,’ said Marnier, ‘absolutely excellent.’

  He talked me through every scene, milking each one for every detail until I was squirming. But by the end I believed that we’d seen the storm coming, grabbed our clothes and run up the beach to the small room she’d taken in the village and we’d continued having each other until we reached a brain-numbing, raw-genitaled standstill. I knew I believed all this because, as Jean-Luc insisted on the refinements to each scene, I felt a terrible weight settling on me, in fact not a weight, just the opposite, an emptiness. The emptiness of infidelity, of guilt, of self-disgust, of humiliation.

  ‘Then,’ said Marnier, after I’d fallen silent, having turned in a performance that would have left an Olympic athlete slack-jawed and trembling.

  ‘Then nothing,’ I said.

  ‘Nothing?’

  ‘Nothing else happened.’

  ‘But there has to be something. There has to be that something extra. That new... frisson to recharge your...’

  ‘It’s finished, Jean-Luc, nothing else happened.’

  ‘You’ve left out one detail.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You’ve told me everything except...’

  ‘There’s nothing left to tell.’

  ‘Except ... your cock. How big is your cock?’

  ‘Piss off, Jean-Luc,’ I said, the disgust strong as the taste of shit in my mouth.

  ‘No. It’s important. It’s the only thing left.’

  I could tell he wasn’t going to let it go.

  ‘Not as big as those guys in the blue movies.’

  ‘But they are impossible. They are freaks.’

  ‘Normal size, Jean-Luc. Normal size.’

  His eyes opened. The good one nearest me was brim full.

  ‘What is normal size?’ he asked.

  Chapter 13

  We drove into Cotonou’s mobile phone footprint at around midday. Marnier called Carole and told her to bring a car to the Hotel Aledjo, organize a room. We got caught in lunchtime traffic coming across the bridge and arrived at the hotel at 1.30 p.m. Carole had taken a bungalow right out down by the sea, away from inquisitive eyes, and, being French, she’d arranged for some food and drink.

  It was Carole and I who hefted the trunk out of my boot into hers and she made light work of it. All that gym time paying off for fifteen seconds. I wouldn’t have minded talking to her, making some kind of connection, but I had no vocabulary for it, and her body language was coming across in Sanskrit, stuff, no doubt, she’d learnt from Marnier and his readings of the Upanishads and his greatest poet of the twentieth century.

  We went back into the room and found Marnier cracking crab claws and slugging back the cold Chablis that sat in a bucket at his feet, one bottle already upside down in the melting ice. Carole sat by his side and I opposite to watch her give a passable rendition of ‘pretty French housewife welcomes home the bacon bringer’. This involved a little bit of shoulder stroking, some head kissing and the occasional morsel feeding. Marnier rewarded her with a constant view of the mash of seafood revolving in his mouth. I didn’t eat so that I could put my full concentration into some Chablis drinking and I was still chugging it back while Marnier was sucking up thimbles of tar poured from a cafetière that never left Carole’s hand. The Marniers’ was an ordered household.

  ‘You owe me two hundred and fifty thousand CFA,’ I said.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, closing his eyes at Carole, who produced an envelope and slid it across to me. I pocketed it. Marnier dug in his trousers and came up with a lump of something small and dirty which he laid in front of me.

  ‘A bonus,’ he said, ‘for a good night’s work.’

  It weighed a good half pound.

  ‘Why should you want to give me a couple of thousand dollars’ worth of gold?’

  ‘I told you. I’m not cheap. And ... you made your choice. One that I’m glad you made, but it will cost you. This, I hope, will go some way to cove
ring those expenses.’

  ‘Then you are being cheap,’ I said, getting up from the table, leaving the lump.

  ‘Don’t be like that,’ he said. ‘You’re well prepared.’

  ‘What if I tell Franconelli what really happened? That you brutally murdered his two men and...’

  ‘If you think that’s a risk worth taking...’ He trailed off. ‘It’s not me sitting in front of Franconelli telling him that.’

  ‘It won’t be me either. I’m not going to see Franconelli.’

  ‘You will. I can assure you of that. He will demand it.’

  ‘I won’t go.’

  ‘Don’t be a kid about this. He’ll make you go.’

  ‘He hasn’t been able to make you go.’

  ‘I’m not so vulnerable. I keep moving. I’m used to it.’

  ‘What did you do to Franconelli that he had to send Gio to ... rearrange you like that?’

  Marnier was instantly furious.

  ‘Yes, exactly my point. What crime did I commit to deserve such a penalty? Did I kill his wife? Did I thin his daughter’s blood with malaria? No. None of these things. I merely spat in his food. Not what you would call a serious offence.’

  ‘Depends how much he liked what he was eating.’

  Carole stroked Jean-Luc back down from the towering inferno.

  ‘Calmes-toi, chéri, calmes-toi.’

  ‘You did more than gob in his stracciatella, Jean-Luc. Come on. Let’s have it.’

  ‘All I did was a little churning.’

  ‘Buttering your own bread, not his.’

  ‘It was small change. All local currency.’

  ‘And you did some local investment for him up and down the coast?’

  ‘I always gave him a good return.’

  ‘And you turned his money round for your own account.’

  C’est normale.’

  ‘How did he catch you?’

  ‘He asked for his money back. It was otherwise engaged in tyres in Ghana at the time. Tyres weren’t moving.’

  ‘Just tyres?’

  ‘There were other things.’

  ‘How much was out?’

  ‘Half a million.’

  ‘Half a million what?’ I asked. ‘Not cedis. He wouldn’t have done that to you for a few hundred quid.’

  ‘Dollars. Half a million dollars.’

  ‘That’s not spit, Jean-Luc,’ I said. ‘How long was it out?’

  He didn’t reply. I looked at him hard and saw something at the back of his dark little peepers.

  ‘You’re lying.’

  ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘You’d never have known if I hadn’t given it away.’

  ‘There’s not much point talking to you, is there?’

  ‘Then ask Franconelli. He’ll tell you. He’s a man of honour.’

  ‘Looks as if I’ll have to.’

  ‘And when you do,’ said Marnier, ‘watch him. Look into his eyes. See if you can see his lies. He’s not as good as me, he never had the training, but he’s better than Carole. I always know when she’s lying. She always looks up into her head to select the lie. Useless. But I’m grateful for it.’

  ‘Perhaps she has other talents which she’s more proud of.’

  ‘She’s a talented manipulator. Women are. Do you think a man is capable of creating an intolerable atmosphere in the home? No. But lying. Men lie for a living.’

  ‘Speak for yourself.’

  ‘Now, M. Medway, don’t come talking to me in your pristine white communion gown. You would have had me killed if I hadn’t squeezed the truth out of you.’

  ‘You knew they were coming. You didn’t need me to tell you.’

  ‘A matter of intelligence, greatly lacking in the Italians.’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Charbonnier has girls who work for him out of La Verdure. The slap on that Nigerian girl’s leg still hadn’t gone down the day after.’

  I looked down at the lump of gold on the table.

  ‘Take it,’ said Marnier.

  ‘Maybe you should be using this to get your face fixed up.’

  ‘My face has gone. I don’t want a rebuilt face. I want my own, not some surgeon’s idea. And anyway, what can I use it for now?’

  I walked to the door, leaving the gold.

  ‘Something to remember about your night with Adèle,’ he said.

  ‘There was no night with Adèle.’

  ‘That is a bad sign, Bruce. You must believe me that for Franconelli to believe you ... you must believe it yourself. And if you are to believe it yourself, then others close to you must believe it of you too.’

  ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’ I said, the booze tanking up the anger quicker than usual.

  ‘You’ve been unfaithful, remember that.’

  I went back to the table and leaned over it to within an inch of Marnier’s ghastly face.

  ‘This isn’t au revoir, Jean-Luc. This is goodbye. That’s adieu to you because you need His help more than anyone I know.’

  ‘I think you’ll find it’s au revoir.; Bruce.’

  I pushed myself off the table.

  ‘You need me,’ he said.

  I walked to the door and opened it.

  ‘You’re going to need that gold too,’ he said.

  I left.

  ‘Don’t forget to call the Hotel de la Plage,’ he shouted after me.

  I went back to the office and called the Hotel de la Plage and asked for Carlo and Gio. I was told they’d checked out the day before. I sounded surprised, left a message and my name and number in case they returned. Another round of lying had begun.

  The thought of phoning Franconelli brought me out in a cold sweat, so I went back home and caught up on some sleep. Terrible sleep. Deep, traumatic sleep where dreams came thick and fast and combined hideously graphic sex with faceless people and, of course, with blood. In the final moments of this hell ride I found myself rutting madly with a nobody who I knew was Adèle, the sand of the beach smoothing my knees as I held the hips of her raised behind before me. We were snorting, like pigs troughing, and when I withdrew, the shaft of my penis was a bloodied stump. I woke with a shout, rolling and yawing in the sweat-drenched sheets and pillows.

  It was dark. I was not alone in the room. Heike’s smell was there. Her silhouette, vague through the mosquito netting, held a glass of water.

  ‘You should drink this,’ she said.

  ‘Christ,’ I said, wringing the whimper out of my voice. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Ten o’clock. You’ve been wrestling with yourself since I got back a couple of hours ago. The noise you were making I thought you had a woman in here.’

  There came a nanosecond of frost-brittled silence.

  ‘Six hours’ sleep,’ I said. ‘And I’m bloody exhausted.’

  Heike came in under the net. I drank the water and sank back.

  ‘You stink of booze.’

  ‘The client bought me lunch.’

  ‘The gout’s going to come back on you again and I’m not going to have any sympathy.’

  ‘I don’t remember much the last time,’ I said, a little more brutal than I intended.

  She hardened on me but not for long. She ran a hand through my sodden hair.

  ‘Ugh, is that sweat?’

  ‘I think it might be Chablis, or a distilled version of it.’

  ‘You’ve got to stop this...’

  ‘Don’t start, Mrs Clean.’

  ‘Ms Clean. It’s still Ms Clean.’

  ‘Well, I can recall a few sessions Ms Clean has had in her time. I’m sure you could have got on a national team. The German one, maybe. Not the British.’

  ‘Don’t be so brutish.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Brutish. Not British. I said don’t be so brutish.’

  ‘OK, I won’t be,’ I said. ‘Neither of those things.’

  ‘You haven’t asked me how I’ve been.’

  I felt stabbed by that,
but rode it out and thought for one clear moment I might tell her the whole thing. Vomit it into her lap and lie back feeling clean and empty of the trouble. But I couldn’t do it. Not to her.

  ‘Did you hear me, Bruce?’

  ‘How’s it been?’ I said, rubbing her tummy, my sweaty hands catching on her skirt material, awkward.

  ‘We’re fine,’ she said, and stood up.

  She told me to take a shower and left the room.

  I stripped and got under the shower and washed myself as clean as I could without flaying myself with the pumice. I stayed under, comforted by the rush of water. Heike came into the bathroom. I heard her clothes drop to the floor.

  Something was missing.

  The sound of her skirt falling, the flutter of her knickers down her slim legs and I’d get the prickling at the base of my spine, the weakening tingle in my groin as the blood started thumping down there. There was nothing. I was as flaccid as shop-tired celery. I faced the wall as she came in under the shower. I felt her breasts on my back, the nipples hard. She ran her hands up the back of my thighs, over my buttocks, over my hips.

  I was in a panic. The automatic desire had gone. By now there should have been some roaring down there, the bellowing of a provoked bull sea lion with mating rights. Her fingers found me and I felt them question what they’d found. She turned me round and dropped to her knees, running her hands up my stomach, down my loins. Still nothing. She gripped my buttocks and the darting, flickering flame of her tongue gave me the first squirm of desire, the first draining moment.

  I felt saved. Guilty but saved.

  I pulled her up and she excited me further by refusing. Then she stood. She was ready and trembling, her throat and cheeks, flushed as usual. Another stab of guilt.

  I lifted her off her feet, pushing her back against the wall, and eased into her. I thought I was ready now, thought I was back to my good self and went to it, but overkeen and frenzied so that I shot my bolt weakly and fizzled out to nothing. I dropped my head on to her shoulder and found myself looking at the vortex of water twisting down the plug hole. I let her down and whispered a lame ‘sorry’ in her ear. She said nothing.

  I got out. She stayed in and washed herself off. I dried myself, looking at her fogged form in the steam beyond the shower curtain.