Number four clerk pushed himself up from his desk and headed for the boss sitting in his idling capsule. The boss slipped his phone off the hook and started talking. I hadn’t heard it ring. The clerk stopped, switched his brain into ‘loaf’ mode and barely ticked over.
The clerk was called in and the paper torn from his pathetic fingers by the instant dynamism of the boss who dismissed him. He switched on the computer and tapped in the numbers. He picked up the phone again and dialled a number. He spoke for three minutes. The clerks looked up at the ceiling where three fans turned slowly enough not to ruffle any papers down below. A faint cry from the glass case invited me into the air-conditioned, carpeted, slightly more fragrant bubble.
‘What do you want to know?’ asked the boss.
‘If any of those containers are here, where are they? If they’re not, who took them away and where?’
‘Same shipment?’
‘No.’
He tapped in the numbers and picked his nose while he waited for each container to be ‘searched’. He wrote ‘NR’ against my inventions. He reached behind him and, from a shelf, took a Motorola radio phone which he played with. Then he put that down and picked his nose some more. The first of Napier Briggs’s containers arrested his finger mid-pick. He wrote a date and a truck’s registration next to it which began with the letters LA for Lagos. He carried on until the next one and did the same. The registration began with OG which was Ogun state whose capital was Abeokuta about 100 kilometres north of Lagos.
‘We were agents for only two of these.’
‘The London office must have given me the wrong numbers...’
‘Which London office?’
‘...or the wrong agents, perhaps.’
He folded the sheet of paper and tapped the edge of his desk with the crease. I took a 5000-CFA note out of my pocket, smoothed it out and pushed it to the middle of the table. He must have been to the minimalist school of bargaining because he managed to convey his disappointment, his utter contempt, for this sum without moving a pore from the neck upwards or breaking the metronome tap of the paper on his desk. I laid another 5000 on top. Still not enough for him, but as far as I was concerned, with that tap, tap, tap chipping away at my head, I’d reached my ceiling.
‘That’s it, my friend,’ I said. ‘I live here.’
‘Who do you represent?’ he asked, looking up from the 10,000 CFA.
‘Myself.’
‘The clerk didn’t give me your name.’
‘I didn’t give him one.’
‘Do you have a card?’
‘No.’
‘Why do you want this information?’
‘Because I’ve been asked to find it,’ I said. ‘And what do you care? You’ve got ten thousand for nothing.’
‘It’s not just a question of money,’ he said, picking up the two notes and stuffing them in his pocket.
‘What’s it a question of?’
He found himself on the brink of an admission he didn’t want to make. I held out my hand and he slid the paper between two fingers. We stood and shook hands. He held on.
‘You didn’t say your name.’
‘Galen Persimmon.’
‘What was that?’ he asked, his eyes opening to full size.
‘People call me G. P Thanks and goodbye.’
I strode through the office, each clerk’s head coming up with the rush as I passed. By the time I had the door open the boss man was standing at the window in his bubble looking out over the container city with the Motorola clamped to his ear. I dropped down the stairs two at a time and felt that gout twinging again which made me lope towards the car like a shinsplit giraffe.
I started the car; the steering wheel had been dipped in molten tar and the seat clung to me like the hottest whore in La Verdure. The four clerks’ faces appeared at the window, the boss at the end with his gut flattened against the glass. I dumped the clutch and squealed six foot of rubber on to the hot tarmac.
I drove without thinking for a few minutes and got myself lost in the container maze, which had been my intention. The smell of diesel in the heat and the mixture of sea and lagoon air polluted by the industry and effluent of the city’s ten million people was making me feel queasy. There was the sound of distant thunder but the sky was clear. Then a gantry crane rumbled and screeched across one of the container canyons.
I found myself in a large square in which a series of massive generators supplied electricity to banks of refrigerated containers. The noise was held down in the box city and crashed around the ribbed metal cliffs of blue, white and orange, reverberating, penetrating, shuddering my insides. Back in the Manhattan gorges the massive mobiles haunted the lanes, and smaller but still giant forklifts pirouetted expertly through carefully choreographed routines.
I turned into a broader lane with forty-foot containers on either side, some of them looking as if they were rusted there for life, not so easy to ship a forty-footer out of there as it was to put them in. A huge mobile appeared at the end of the lane with its arms raised and a forty-foot container above its head. There was a crossroads about fifty yards in front of it and I accelerated to turn into it and let the mobile past. Its exhaust blatted black smoke and the tyres which had momentarily quivered in the sickening heat rolled solidly forward to block the crossroads. The driver in his cab was on his feet talking into a Motorola. I reversed with a panicked howl from the engine when the reverse gear popped out of its socket. I held the shift in place and smelt the blue smoke whining out of the wheel arches.
There was three hundred yards to cover to the next turning. My head flicked back to see the mobile in front of me moving forward again, rollicking over the undulations in the tarmac, its glassless cab door swinging open and banging shut. I held the gear shift in place with my foot, gripped the back of the passenger seat and looked behind in time to see another mobile swing into the lane with a forty-footer held a few inches off the ground, bulldozing its way forward. I slammed on the brakes, the engine stalled and the car slewed across the lane. I tried to restart. The engine turned over without catching. I went to open the door but the sky darkened as the rusted cliff of the container closed in.
It hit the car broadside and shunted it sideways with such violence that I heard the whiplash crack of my neck vertebrae. My body was jolted over the handbrake. The colours, names and numbers of parked containers flashed in front of the frame of the windscreen like dull footage through an old Moviola. There was an explosion of compressed air and the passenger side dropped as the tyres were torn off their rims. The light dimmed on the passenger side. There was another crash and the Peugeot sandwich was complete. The clear glass of the windscreen crystallized, held for a second, and with a buckling of the frame and a popping of the rubber seal, diamonds of glass fell into my lap from all sides. The mobiles paused and strained as if constipated and then farted loudly and backed away. I scrambled through the rhomboid frame of the windscreen out on to the bonnet. It flickered through my panic that there was no feeling in my left hand and a hot iron bar was being held to the side of my neck.
I slid off the bonnet. My knees dropped from underneath me. I fell on my side, a burnt oil smell from the tarmac in my nostrils. The sun was blocked again. The mobiles had raised the forty-footers above their cabs. I rolled over to the parked containers and found a crack in the wall and slipped in, one arm hanging limp and dead. The first mobile dropped its container on to the roof of the car. The shock absorbers did not absorb the shock. The chassis thumped on to the ground, a wheel was sheered from an axle, the front grille and headlights popped out. Steam hissed from the radiator like pained breath between teeth.
The mobile lifted off its container and backed away. The second mobile dropped its load. Between them they dropped their containers six times and flattened the car. The metal crumpled, folded and compacted. The mobiles roared approval at each other like conquering leviathans. Gasoline and metallic steam patched the ground. When the car was no more than
a six-inch block the mobiles took their containers and backed off down the lane.
The sunshine continued, the generators pounded in the distance, the heat boxed in, my mouth remained slack and open and my elbow felt as if it had a four-inch screw being drilled into it down the ulna.
I’ve always admired ambiguity as a subtle tool that can both interest and confuse, however I have a huge respect for the clear, bold statement, especially accompanied by violence.
I ran. My gouty foot bleated. My dead arm swung like an empty sleeve.
Chapter 11
The Port Authority were sceptical. What did you expect? I had to drop my trousers, pull up my shirt tails and deposit quarter of a windscreen in gem form on the brown lino floor before I could even get a nod of possibility from them.
The Port Authority police took me for a drive down the forty-foot container lanes. We found the spot, and that was all it was, a dark patch on the tarmac from the gasoline and a brown tinge from the evaporated water, but no crushed Peugeot Estate. The police exchanged puzzlement. Whatever book they were going by had no procedure for crushed cars making contact with another world. They asked me what I wanted from them. I lost my head and demanded a full investigation, as if I was fresh off the plane from London and had never been to Africa before. Their entire inner workings seized. The senior officer gave me a sinister look and started talking about the seriousness of cars coming into the port but not going out. I backed off.
‘Hey, guys,’ I said, digging out some light expressions I never used, ‘it’s only a car. What say you write out a crash report and give me a half chance of getting some insurance.’
They all laughed at that. They knew I had no chance. I put my hands in my pockets and came out with two handfuls of glass. I let them fall from my lifeless fingers and asked for a lift back to the port gates.
There’s nowhere left for the traffic to go in Lagos. It has now filled every road and side street in the capital so that nothing moves except between two and four in the morning. A meeting downtown could take the whole day. If the appointment was for any earlier than four in the afternoon and you set out any later than six in the morning the meeting will take you two days and cost a night in a downtown hotel. Throw in the accumulation of carbon monoxide which goes nowhere in the high humidity. Add the dammed frustration of rivers of volatile drivers who could go up like sparked avgas. Tack on the neediness of impotent traffic cops, wedge in a dash of armed robbery, and lying under the bed in a darkened room seems a much better option than trying to earn a living. Unfortunately, not many people in Lagos thought like that and even in the tense days after the military annulled the free and fair elections for civilian rule the traffic barely faltered. Even when the oil workers went on strike and there was no petrol people still found time to get together and make a traffic jam.
This was why I took a taxi to ‘Mile Two’, which was well outside Lagos but had a ferry station which went down Porto Novo Creek to the Apapa Docks and then across Lagos Harbour to Marina which was on Lagos Island and downtown.
I called David Bartholomew at the British High Commission from a restaurant on Marina and arranged to meet him in the evening in the five-star luxury of the Eko Meridien Hotel on Kyrano Waters. This hotel was on the other side of Victoria Island from the British HC. Lagos and Victoria Islands are joined by a bridge across Five Cowrie Creek which I crossed on foot at dusk. I found a taxi outside the British HC which took me to a guesthouse called Y-Kays on Adeola Hopewell Street which was close to the Eko Meridien geographically but a long way off in style.
I met David Bartholomew at 7.30 p.m. by the hotel pool. I’d showered but it hadn’t made any difference. I hadn’t changed my clothes. They were in a bag in a very small cavity in a crushed Peugeot. David had detected the element of stress in my voice over the phone and had decided I needed pampering. A whisky with a real live Löwenbrau chaser was parked on the table in front of my empty chair.
‘I love you, David,’ I said.
‘There’s no need to go that far,’ he said, with a camp flick of the wrist which he occasionally pulled out of the bag but which, for most of his professional life, he kept tied down. ‘There doesn’t have to be any love, you know.’
David was tall, just an inch shorter than me. He had thick, dramatically moussed jet-black hair, a full and very red mouth, dark-brown lustrous eyes with long cow lashes and a kind of prewar elegance that I thought had been blown away by the sixties. He was forty-four years old and people were still saying, ‘Funny how he never married.’
His slacks were so exquisitely tailored, as were each of his seventy-two suits. His shirt, which he was wearing outside his trousers, was of such fine cream silk. His intelligence and conversation, when he wasn’t talking politics, was of such sophistication that it was impossible to believe that what he really wanted from life was to be taken by a six foot three, black stevedore from Apapa Docks and given a very rough seeing-to. This, and it was not for lack of wishful thinking, had never happened.
‘Live in hope, Bruce,’ he’d said to me, at the end of a long drunken night in Cotonou when that admission had eased its way through the glasses and bottles on the table. ‘Live in hope, that’s the thing.’
More astonishing than this, even more astonishing than the blue/white Omo pallor of his skin which could make the London tan look erotic, was that this revelation came on top of the gradual unveiling of David’s extremely rightwing views.
What he required from the Apapan docker had slipped out after a mean and unpleasant row about UK immigration policy. David marshalled his views and put them across with a combination of irrefutable logic and devastating timing from a highly educated head, while I bellowed injustice from an inadequately prepared and inconsistently fed heart.
David had a first in PPE from Oxford University.
‘They gave me the clap,’ he’d said, feeling wicked that night—not professorial VD but a degree so brilliant that when he walked in for his viva voce, or as mortals call it, his ‘interview’, the panel of dons stood and applauded. The two A-levels I’d squeezed out of my London grammar were no match for the air-cooled recesses of David’s massive brain.
When I’d digested that unlikely union of David with an Apapan docker I’d said: ‘Don’t you think your sexual needs and political beliefs are somewhat at odds, David?’
‘How close you come to calling me a hypocrite, Bruce,’ he’d said, tossing back another whisky. ‘I’m not. The African in his own land is a noble man, a man who belongs, a man with history and culture behind him. They are a beautiful people in their own country. Compare them to the trash we have on our own streets, those gangs of dissolute youth with their... what did Tom Wolfe call it... their “pimp roll”, their bristling, recidivistic aggression, their...’
‘That’s enough, David,’ I’d said, and he’d smirked like a naughty boy.
‘You’d rather I said it than anybody else though, Bruce, wouldn’t you?’
David was a difficult friend to have. Liberals were his meat and drink. He had two cards: the queer card and the fascist card. He played them hard and fast and watched the wishy-washies squirm. Heike couldn’t stand to be in the same room as him. Her flesh crawled whenever he kissed her hello. In the past he’d shown me some vulnerability and asked for a little trust on it. I found it difficult to turn someone down under those circumstances.
I polished off the whisky and gargled with the ice-cold Lowenbrau. David snapped his fingers at a waiter and pointed at the empties.
‘You’re looking seedier than usual, Bruce,’ he said, lighting up some dreadful brand of menthol cigarette he liked to smoke. ‘You look like the kind of person I had to beat off me in dark little cinemas in Soho. Ugh! Unbearable people.’
‘I had my car crushed by two forty-foot containers on Tin Can Island today. No change of clothes, no shaving gear, no toothbrush.’
‘You haven’t hauled me out here just to borrow money, have you?’
‘I have money.
This is rare, I know. All I want is some information.’
‘I’m always giving you help and information but...’
‘You work for the High Commission, that’s what you’re supposed to do.’
‘...but what do I get in return?’
‘What more do you want? You get a salary, a car, a house, a maid, a cook, a gardener...’
‘A kiss. A chaste little kiss.’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, David.’
‘You started it with the “I love you” business.’
‘I was in the car when they started crushing it. You’re lucky you’re not supervising having me cut out of a steel ingot. I’m tense, nervous...’
‘Sorry, ‘course you are.’
‘You still haven’t found your Apapan docker?’
‘Er, not exactly,’ said David, staring off into the night.
The waiter came and unloaded the fresh drinks. I reached for my pocket as if I’d felt a kidney stone on the move. David held up his hand and signed for it.
‘Might as well let Her Majesty buy the odd round.’
‘She’s very generous.’
‘Not as generous as she used to be,’ he said, and drained the rest of his first beer. ‘What do you want?’
‘Napier Briggs. You called the other day asking about him.’
‘Did I?’
‘You said you didn’t, but we know you did.’
‘Ah, Napier,’ said David, with natural cadence, a travesty of pity leaked into his face. ‘Another lost soul. Utterly pathetic man. You said he’d died.’
David liked using callousness for effect.
‘You were a bit more interested in him than that, weren’t you, David?’
‘Was I? As I recall, you brought him up.’
‘Why did you pass him on to us?’
‘He wanted me to do something but he wouldn’t tell me anything, wouldn’t give me any details. All he could say was, “Two million dollars, I’ve lost two million dollars and all you can do is tell me to go home.” A terrible bore. I told him about an American we’d heard of the week before who’d dropped two and a half mil on a “fees and taxes” scam but, like all of them, he thinks he’s a special case.’