A Darkening Stain

  ‘Would she be interested in gold?’ I asked, bearing something in mind.

  ‘I don’t see why not. It’s the heaviest money there is. Have you got some?’

  ‘A little in the bridgework of my teeth.’

  ‘She might not be that open-minded,’ he said.

  ‘Can you get me a meeting with her?’

  ‘If you’ve got something just turn up at her office,’ he said. ‘You’re white. She’ll let you in.’

  I had lunch, a piece of fish in a hot pepper sauce and the usual lump of starch. I sent a beer down after it and felt it swill and eddy like frothy sea in a rocky inlet. I bought a Guardian newspaper and a half bottle of Bell’s, which was all they had, for the traffic jam that I knew was out there waiting for me. It was going to be a crawl over to the other side of Lagos Island to get on to the Third Axial Road up to an area called Shomulu which butted on to the lagoon where Madame Sokode had her office—four hours minimum.

  Out in the creaking heat people looked unusually happy given that Lagos is one of the most punishing cities in the world to five in and the rains don’t make it any better with a quarter of the population living on the street. The newspaper filled me in. The Nigerian football team were in the Olympic quarter finals heading for gold. A solid, tangible ray of golden light pierced the heart of darkness. The rest was not such easy reading. Still no democracy. Oil price depressed. Niara in free fall. Crime wave—tidal. There was nobody I knew in the death notices which was cheering.

  The newspaper done, the nerves came back. I didn’t know what I was going to say or offer to Madame Sokode, and there was still a good chance that Daniel had not been beaten to a pulp for dropping a few mil from his float. I could just be walking into the mincer. Breathing exercises would have helped or a personal stress manager to suffer for me. I reached for the Bell’s.

  I found the offices around 4.30 p.m. A small concrete block of three floors, just like Die said but without the supermarket underneath. There was a parking compound in the front and a security guard who for a note let me in, told me Madame Sokode hadn’t arrived and said her company, called Nexim, was on the top floor.

  I shook the jam out of my legs, unstuck my shirt and made for the entrance looking like a bum. There were brass plates on the outside for three companies: Nexim, Bortran and Finlan. Just inside the door was a guard with a leg-length truncheon and army boots who looked at everybody who went past him, daring them to make eye contact. I walked in giving him a balls-out look that had him checking outside to see who was holding my train. A black Mercedes arrived which interested him more and I went up to the first floor.

  Through the reinforced glass doors of Bortran Co. Ltd I saw a keen-eyed receptionist with a complicated hairpiece and Western clothes. She had her eyes closed, holding her blouse away from her breasts, getting some cool air circulating. I ducked into the office. Her eyes snapped open. She dropped her blouse front.

  ‘How may I help you?’ she said in a frosty Americanized voice.

  I asked her if it was Nexim and she pointed me up.

  ‘Did you study in America to get an accent like that?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, I did,’ she said, still cool.

  ‘And now you work for Madame Sokode?’ I guessed.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, disappointed. ‘It was my dad got me the job, you know, like it’s not so easy to find jobs in Lagos.’

  ‘Unless you know people.’

  ‘Right,’ she said, keeping her eyes on me, not quite friendly yet.

  ‘And what do Bortran do to keep you interested?’

  ‘Shipping. Containers. Stuff like that.’

  ‘So you do all the shipping for Nexim?’

  ‘Not so much. We clear their containers for them. Building materials from Spain, supermarket goods from England—’ she stopped suddenly.

  Three people walked past the glass doors. The first, a very beautiful, tall, thin and poised woman dressed from headscarf to ankle in blue and white Dutch Wax African print. Her head was completely still on top of her loping body, so still that the three-inch gold-drop earrings she was wearing did not swing with her motion. She was a cat, a stalking cat. The man behind her was a different animal, a short squat bull rhino in dark-green robes with a very black and shiny face. The third was the driver, carrying two large Samsonite suitcases and a face as glum as a gun’s. The zoo team filed past and continued up the stairs.

  ‘Madame Sokode?’ I said to the receptionist. ‘Was that her husband?’

  She threw her head back and clapped her hands at that one.

  ‘That was her father,’ she said, amazed at me. ‘Madame Sokode isn’t married.’

  ‘She must have to work at it to stay that way.’

  ‘They say she only likes white boys,’ she said, giving me a flirty dare-you look, the accent slipping towards Nigerian.

  ‘I’m tall enough.’

  ‘I don’t think that matters.’

  ‘Well, that’s a shame because I’m not weighed down in the money department.’

  ‘She is.’

  ‘So what is it?’ I asked, and she tapped her forehead. ‘Brains?’

  ‘That’s what I hear,’ she said.

  ‘I always hated school,’ I said, and she gave me a tough-shit look. ‘If she kicks me out I’ll buy you a drink.’

  ‘As for me,’ she said, wagging her finger, ‘you’d have to be...’

  ‘Black?’ I asked, turning at the door. ‘I don’t do black.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she said, ‘but you would have to be ... what was that you said...”weighed down in the money department”?’

  She tinkled a little wave at me and I went upstairs.

  The receptionist at Nexim was one of those large, impassive, obstructive African women in full gear with a ‘the eagle has landed’ headpiece in cobalt blue and maize yellow. I asked to see Madame Sokode and she asked if I had an appointment, knowing damn well. I shook my head, which pleased her. She asked for a business card and I gave her one with just my name and phone number on the card. She reversed out of her desk like a forklift and trolleyed down the corridor.

  A few moments later I was shown through a waiting room containing father, driver and two suitcases and on into one of those rare African offices where the desk didn’t take up half the room. Madame Sokode looked me in the eye and I put her at 6’ 2” in her sandals. She extended a featherweight hand, knuckles up, which asked for a papal kiss. I shook it and sat down on one of two repro chairs on my side while she paced the office as if she had a dictionary on her head.

  The room was tastefully decked in African art, Italian table lamps and English furnishings. There was no connection between this woman, this setting and Daniel’s bordello of six-year-olds. She stopped at the window and looked out through the slim grey blinds. I wiped a trickle of sweat off my eyebrow. There was no air con in the room.

  ‘I think it’s going to rain very hard tonight,’ she said in perfect English, without the slightest trace of a Nigerian accent.

  ‘It’s that time of year,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, turning back into the room. ‘Do you like the rainy season? Don’t you miss your British four seasons?’

  ‘Yes and yes,’ I said.

  She walked round the back of my chair and sat in the one next to me, cool, not a hint of perspiration. She crossed her legs under the ankle-length skirt and a one-inch slim-heeled gold sandal flashed. She flipped away the corner of her jacket so that I could see she had a sleeveless top on underneath with an inch of bare, flat, uncreased torso showing at the bottom of it. She folded her hands and gave me the benefit of her very dark eyes which were all pupil and no iris. She drank me in some more and I felt the pressure of those black limpid wells sucking me in.

  ‘What are you doing in Africa?’ she asked.

  ‘Making a living.’

  ‘Not a very good one,’ she said, introducing a little edge early on.

  I didn’t respond.

  ‘Your Peuge
ot looks a little sad,’ she said.

  ‘I leave her out at night. She’s resentful.’

  She smiled, which didn’t ease my mind. Her teeth were brilliant white but a little pointy from the front to the canines and she zipped up quick as if she’d been told this was off-putting.

  ‘My African business theory,’ I said, ‘is that if you’re white and you drive around showing your all you’re just inviting people to come and take it off you.’

  ‘Not something practised by the Africans themselves.’

  ‘How right you are,’ I said, and she nearly smiled again.

  ‘So how do you make this ... unostentatious ... living?’ she asked, sidling up to the point, not getting to it, not just yet.

  ‘Africa is full of opportunities—’

  ‘Yes,’ she interrupted, and then dropped it, worried that I might be rushing it.

  ‘You’ve got a very expensive English education on you,’ I said, taking my turn to flee the nub.

  She notched up her accent and gave me the name of an English girls’ public school where pocket money came on Amex gold cards.

  ‘And they still teach deportment there,’ I said, and she really liked that but didn’t want to show those teeth again so she stood and stripped off her jacket and laid it across her desk with long slim arms with only the BCG blemish.

  ‘Just hockey and lacrosse,’ she said.

  ‘And rounders in the summer, I’ll bet.’

  ‘Useless game,’ she said bitterly, and sat back down.

  ‘How long were you over there to get an accent like that?’

  ‘I was sent away when I was five,’ she said, looking at the door, hoping her father overheard.

  ‘University?’ I asked, to get away from that little darkness.

  ‘Bristol.’

  ‘Your father must have made some money to—’

  ‘My mother. She sold cigarettes on the street singly when she was six and built up from there to make one of the biggest drinks and tobacco distribution companies in West Africa.’

  ‘And where’s that now?’

  ‘We sold it after her death,’ she said. ‘You have a lot of questions, Mr Medway.’

  ‘I thought we were just talking.’

  ‘I thought you came to see me ... What did you come to see me about?’

  ‘An opportunity.’

  ‘For you or me?’

  ‘The two of us.’

  ‘Why should I want to do business with you?’

  ‘I’m here. We’re talking the same language.’

  She leaned across the desk, picked up the phone and yabbered away in what I thought was Igbo and sat back down again.

  ‘I’ve just sent my father back to his house in my car so you’ll have to take me to mine in yours. Is that all right?’

  Chapter 20

  Now I was nervous we weren’t getting to the point. I thought for a moment I’d had my hands full of initiative but it was just sweat and soggy chinos after all. Madame Sokode wanted to talk. She’d just picked her father up from the airport where he’d flown in from London after some treatment or other she didn’t want to talk about. Now he was dispatched, she wanted to rack up some tongue miles. I didn’t have that much of a point to get to so for me dawdling with the yakety-yak didn’t seem a bad option except ... this went on for three hours.

  In those three hours we covered the ground Die had in fourteen seconds. We also changed location. I took her up to her new house, just recently finished, at the back of an almost American-style middle-income housing estate in Ikeja.

  ‘I like being near the airport,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be down there on Vic Island a five-hour traffic jam from anywhere. The air’s better too.’

  Interesting stuff.

  She didn’t get to talk to too many interesting people by the sounds of things, or at them, even. She told me how much she disliked Lagos society and the expectations of family and friends. She didn’t go out much, maybe up to the Sheraton for a drink, but that was it. She talked about her family, trashed them heavily, including old rhino. The friends didn’t cut it either. The girls were all sluts and the boys ... well, just as you’d have thought given the girls.

  And, as you know, Mr Medway,’ she said, ‘that’s a very dangerous state of affairs in this day and age.’

  I didn’t know why that ‘you’ had to take such a heavy stress.

  A watchman opened up the steel gates to let us in on a short, straight drive up to the house which was a big neo-colonial affair with a red-tiled roof and long shuttered windows. It had a pillared and netted verandah out the front overlooking a garden with mature palms and plenty of building detritus. She led me up long wide steps to the front door, which was not opened by a servant.

  ‘The furniture hasn’t arrived yet,’ she said, as if this explained the lack of staff.

  She unlocked the door and leaned into it. It was hotter inside than out. She flipped the light switch and a monsoon of cut glass lit up in the roof above a double staircase which went up to what she was already telling me was eight bedrooms with bathrooms en suite. Looking forward to having all those family members and friends she liked so much.

  ‘I couldn’t wait to get out of my father’s house,’ she said, showing me into a living room with a three-piece suite, a table and nothing else but acres of parquet flooring. ‘Drink?’

  I’d been inches off flipping the glove and chugging the Bell’s all the way out here so I went for the drink and let her know the kind of measure required, but not the amount of paranoia it had to quell. What was I doing here? She told me to wander the house, tell her what I thought. I said she could turn on the air conditioning if she liked, but she didn’t like ... she didn’t have.

  She then unnerved me by leaving from one door and reappearing through another with a large whisky, then floating off again and coming up behind me soundlessly on bare feet in a lime-green minidress. I lagged a few yards behind as she led me into yet another stately-home-sized room and found that she’d vanished when I got in there. Snuck into some double-doored closet built into the wall, only to shiver me down again by ghosting into the corner of my eye in a tiger-striped top and ankle-length skirt ensemble.

  The whole performance put me in mind of the great white hunter pursuing the cunning cat only to find himself getting manoeuvred into the killing spot.

  After the seven-bedroom tour (all empty, the eighth was hers and private) she took me back downstairs to the living room and we sat on the hot easy chairs opposite each other, the sofa vacant between us. I drank. She didn’t. She didn’t open any of the shutters on the windows in the room, either, and the one thousand cubic feet of brilliantly lit space around us was as thick as New York subway air.

  ‘I lied to you before,’ she said.

  Here we go.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘The furniture.’

  ‘When it’s coming, you mean?’

  ‘I cancelled it. Do you think that’s strange?’

  ‘Only if you like clutter.’

  ‘I had a German boyfriend once,’ she said, as if the word ‘clutter’ had reminded her.

  ‘What was his name?’ I asked, trying to get into the spirit, wanting to get out of here badly.

  ‘Helmut,’ she said, as if I’d just questioned her integrity.

  ‘And Helmut was into squash-court living?’ I asked. ‘Or was his name Klutter?’

  Wrong sense of humour. Her mouth hardened up on me.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I mean did he like space? Clean lines? Freedom from the trappings of consumer society?’

  ‘No. He was a homosexual,’ she said, derailing the clutter conversation.

  ‘Madame Sokode,’ I started and then decided to do some derailing myself. ‘Why are you called “Madame” if you’re Nigerian?’

  ‘I’m not “Mrs”, I can’t stand “Ms”, nobody’s going to call me “Miss” at my age and “Sistah” is out of the question. I did some business in Francophon
e West Africa, they called me “Madame”. I liked it. You can call me Elizabeth if you want,’ she said, as if this wasn’t her real name but would do for the evening.

  I’d painted myself into a corner with nowhere to go but the point, but how to start? Do you do virgins for export? No. Mine’s another double and then I must get going. A question like that gets out into the open and nothing stays the same. There was also the fear that Daniel had shot me some shit about Madame Sokode, that she was just as Die had painted her and I was going to drop a stink bomb from which all we could do was sprint.

  ‘Mr Medway?’

  ‘Bruce, Elizabeth,’ I said, snapping out of it.

  ‘Bruce, I wanted to tell you about Helmut.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to invade your privacy,’ I said, a tad Victorian, but I really didn’t need to hear about Helmut.

  ‘It’s easier to talk to strangers.’

  ‘As long as they stay that way.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You don’t want to reveal your inner life and then have it paraded around your family and friends.’

  ‘Oh, I see, I thought you meant you didn’t like being intimate.’

  Maybe I didn’t.

  ‘Surely Helmut was bisexual,’ I said, thinking, we’re not going to get away from the guy so let’s do him and quick.

  ‘No. He was homosexual. He always preferred boys. It didn’t bother me. Our relationship suited each other. He liked to be seen with a beautiful African woman on his arm and...’ I knew I had to look her in the eye for this, ‘... and I didn’t like sex. Still don’t.’

  The relief was substantial.

  ‘So what happened to...?’

  ‘Everything in Africa is sex,’ she said, bitterly and with disgust.

  ‘It’s the only fun there is if you’re living in grinding poverty.’

  ‘You were going to ask me something,’ she said, not enjoying the concept of a billion people hoeing their way to a night’s satisfying rut.

  ‘So what happened to Helmut if you suited each other so well?’

  ‘He died.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘Helmut was a great card player and I can assure you he had a very good understanding of probability.’