Brazzaville Beach (9 page)

The war had benefited the airport in other respects, however. Half the federal government's air force was based there now: a near squadron of Mig 15 “Fagot” fighters, three ex-RAF Canberra bombers, half a dozen Aermacchi trainers converted to ground attack and assorted helicopters. As we drove past the perimeter fence I could see the old Fokker Friendship revving up at the end of the runway about to depart on its evening flight to the capital,
and beyond it, in their bays, the tubby, tilted-back silhouettes of the Migs.

At the hotel I said good night to Martim and Vemba, agreed to the time of our rendezvous the next morning, and checked in. The hotel was distinctly shabby these days, all incentive to keep it spruced up having long gone, but, after weeks at Grosso Arvore and my tent, it seemed to me still redolent of a tawdry but alluring glamour. It had a restaurant, a cocktail bar and a half olympic-sized swimming pool with a barbecue area. Its rooms were contained in two-story annexes, connected to the main building by roofed-over walkways that passed through tropical gardens. Scattered here and there were one- and two-bedroom bungalows for those guests who planned a longer stay. Sometimes, piped Latin-American music was played in the lobby. The staff wore white, high-collared jackets with gold buttons. At the entrance to the restaurant a notice requested, in English:
LADIES PLEASE NO SHORTS. GENTLEMEN PLEASE TIES
. Whether it was the ghosts from the heady days of the bauxite factory contractors' ball, or the still lingering pretensions of the current management, the Airport Hotel (this was its evocative name) had an ambience all its own. It also had air conditioning, sometimes, and hot and cold running water, sometimes, both luxuries that were permanently absent at Grosso Arvore.

I walked through the unkempt gardens to my room, unpacked, had a shower and changed into a dress. I felt fresh, cool and hungry.

I strolled along a walkway to the main building. It was now quite dark and the warmth of the night air, after the chill of my room, seemed to lie gently on my clean bare arms and shoulders like a muslin shawl. I could hear some rumba Muzak wafting over from the lobby's sound system and from all around me in the grass and bushes came the endless
creek-creek
of the crickets. I stopped and filled my lungs, smelling Africa—smelling dust, woodsmoke, perfume from a flower, something musty, something decaying.

I turned onto another path and quickened my pace toward one of the cottages. Its windows were shuttered but I could see light shining behind them.

I knocked on the door and waited. I knocked again and it was opened.

Usman Shoukry looked at me, not surprised, but trying not to smile. He was wearing loose linen shorts and a lilac T-shirt. His hair was shorter than the time I had last seen him.

“Look who's here,” I said.

“Hope,” he said, deliberately, as if he were christening me. “Come on in.”

I did, and he shut the door. When I kissed him I stuck my tongue in his mouth and slipped my hands under his T-shirt and felt his back, running them up to his shoulder blades and then down beneath the waistband of his shorts, my palms resting lightly on his cool, hairless buttocks.

I broke away from the kiss, still holding him to me. His mouth was glossy with saliva. He rubbed it dry with the back of his hand, smiling at me again. I looked at him as if I hadn't seen him for years. The sherry color of his brown eyes, his slightly askew nose, his thick lips.

“Are you in trouble?” he asked.

“No. Why?”

“I wasn't expecting you for two months.”

“Well, it's your lucky day, then, isn't it? Come on, let's eat before they run out of food.”

THE INVERSE CASCADE

Hope Clearwater buys four parsnips in the market today. She is delighted and very surprised to find them. She asks the trader where they came from. Nigeria, the trader says. Hope doesn't believe her, and questions her skeptically: “Where exactly in Nigeria?” The trader is not pleased to have her word doubted. “Jos,” she says, and turns away. Hope remembers that Jos is situated high on a plateau in central Nigeria. All sorts of fruit and vegetables can be grown there because of its cool nights and dry days—even raspberries and strawberries
.

The parsnips remind her of a story John told her about an old professor
of his. This man had worked for a time on the problem of turbulent diffusion. For his experiments he required a large number of floats that had to be at once highly visible and not affected by wind. For this reason balls—both rubber and Ping-Pong—would be of no use. After experimenting with turnips and potatoes, the professor discovered that the ideal vegetable was the parsnip. Its rough, conic configuration, and the fact that in the water most of the vegetable was below the surface, made it a stable float and indifferent to all but the severest breezes
.

What the professor did was to paint several dozen parsnips white and tip sackfuls of them off a bridge over the River Cam. The white parsnips would float downstream, be caught in eddies, cluster and circle in side-swirls or flow downriver in long bobbing strings, photographed by the professor's assistants standing with cameras on both banks of the river at intervals of twenty yards
.

The professor (Hope can't remember his name) bad done useful work, John said. The problem was that, despite his imaginative experimental technique, his thinking was too rigid. He believed that turbulence was caused by a cascade of energy from large eddies to small. But John's own work—his breakthrough, as he termed it—had shown that this was only part of the story. In every case of turbulence, in whatever medium, there is also an inverse cascade, a flow of energy from the small eddy back to the large. Hope remembers clearly the day John proved this. He had explained it to her, his voice hoarse with excitement. Disorder, he said, is not simply handed down a chain; some of it is always being handed back again. Once that fact is grasped, a great deal that was baffling about turbulent systems becomes far easier to understand
.

 

When John Clearwater came back from America he was in good form. He had met someone at the conference—a statistician—who had helped him enormously, almost without knowing it. He told Hope about these new avenues that had opened up, new potentials he could now see. Hope laughed with him, with genuine pleasure—with relief perhaps—at this excitement. Once again what he told her—he spent two hours trying to explain it to her—meant little or nothing, but she felt pleased, reassured. That time, after his return from America, calmed her, staunched the thin hemorrhage of anxiety and doubt. All, it seemed, was well again.

He worked as hard as ever, leaving the flat at eight in the morn
ing and not returning, usually, until nine at night, but their hours together seemed to Hope to recapture some of the vivacity and edge of their first months of marriage. Later, when she looked back, she realized that they had merely been going through another phase. (She found she could demarcate the phases in her married life as efficiently as a historian—they seemed as precise as the circles of growth in the trunk of a tree.) In this particular phase a new enthusiasm dominated—the cinema. They went fairly frequently to the cinema and theater, whenever the mood took them, or whenever some triumphant succés d'estime seemed to demand it. But now John wanted to go out every second or third night. And at first it was fun. His absorption was so intense and single-minded, and the pleasure he took in the cinema so manifestly good for his spirits, that it was a privilege, she reckoned, to share in it. But after six weeks of this, amounting to over two dozen visits—some films were returned to two or three times—she began to find that the strain of accompanying him was growing and she started making excuses.

Part of the problem was that he insisted sitting very close to the screen, in the front row preferably, and certainly no farther back than the third, so that his entire field of vision was dominated by the projected image. At first this was oddly exhilarating, and Hope would emerge from the cinema with her head reverberating like a gong from the big booming pictures, breathless and jangled.

His other idiosyncrasy, however, was harder to take and began to irritate her. He was scrupulous about the type of film they saw. Reviews in as many newspapers as possible were studied and collated, and he built up a small library of film reference books in an attempt to ensure that the film they were going to see would fulfill the demands he made of it. She accused him, jokingly at first, of being the only person she had ever met who sought to entertain himself in a wholly prescriptive way. It was the very opposite of random; he wanted to take no risks. “How can you enjoy yourself, how can you have fun, without an element of risk?” He paid no attention. It was not a narrow censorship he indulged in—he was very keen on horror films and violent thrillers—it was simply that he believed, with a fundamentalist's zeal, that a true film, a
film that was true to the nature of its own form, had to have a happy ending.

“Don't be so ridiculous,” Hope said, when he first put this to her.

“No, honestly…a film that doesn't have a happy ending is—” He paused. “—is misunderstanding the basis of all cinema.”

“OK. OK. How many counterexamples do you want me to give you? Two dozen? Three dozen?”

“No. Don't you see?” He was enjoying himself. “Put it this way. The essence of all art is positive. At root. So in the one great popular art form,
the
popular art form, this motive has to be even more powerful.”

Hope wondered then if he were teasing her. But his expression—candid, intense—belied this. “Nonsense,” she said. “Rubbish. What more can I say?”

But he wasn't joking.

And so it went on. And so John only saw those films that did not, as he saw it, demean or betray cinema's true purpose. Hope came to realize fairly swiftly that going to see these films was in a real sense therapeutic for him. They functioned as a kind of drug, and she began to see how his close-up, all-enveloping, dream-fulfilling cinema buoyed him up and kept him floating. Those few weeks of ease she had experienced after his return from the conference began to be eroded once again by the slow drip, drip of worry.

 

Hope looked up at John's taut, stretched face as he came. She saw his brow crumple, his cheeks concave, and heard a grunting deep in his throat. Then he exhaled and smiled and lowered his head until their noses met. He settled his weight on his elbows as Hope touched his wiry hair. He fitted his head into the angle of her neck and shoulder and exhaled again, his breath warm and moist against her skin. Inside her she felt the small shiftings and slippings as his penis detumesced. She sensed a complementary swelling of love for him in her throat as she dragged her fingers over his head, down across the thick hair that grew on his neck, trailing them lightly across the flaky blur of big freckles on his shoulder blades, making him shiver.

Catching the thin, sour smell of fresh sweat from his armpits, she slipped her hand into his armpit, feeling the hairs slick and clotted between her fingers. She kissed his neck, pressing her nose into his neck, smelling his own particular scent, his spoor. She remembered thinking once, before she married, what kind of man she wanted to live with, and had run through the various types that seemed most commonly on offer—the caring ones, the bastards, the strong ones, the moneyed, the humorists, the saints—and had decided that what she wanted was not a model or an archetype, but somebody quite different. A man. A person. Different from her.

Hope held and smelled this real person that she had found. Then she slipped her fingers into her mouth and tasted his salt sweat. She reached down his spine to touch the small, flat button of a mole that grew four inches above the cleft in his buttocks and reveled selfishly in the quiddity of this individual who was hers, whom she possessed…. Intimacy made her melancholy and exhilarated. She turned her head and kissed him on the mouth, forcing his teeth apart with a blunt, strong tongue and then sucking his own tongue into her mouth, tasting his saliva.

She pushed him over onto his back and felt his flaccid penis slide wetly from her.

“Ah. Sheets,” he said.

“I love you, John,” she said. “And don't you forget it.”

“I won't. But I've forgotten the tissues.”

“Then the deal's off.”

 

It was a Sunday morning. He brought her a mug of tea and then went out to buy newspapers and bread. She shouted at him to put some music on the record player before he left. He couldn't have heard her because the door closed and there was only silence.

She rolled over and sat on the edge of the bed looking down at her lap and thighs, thinking dully that she was putting on weight. She cupped her soft stomach with both hands—she was. She sighed, and then, absentmindedly, with the backs of her fingers, gently stroked her pubic hair—unusually thick, she thought, a brash, dense triangle—and thought about John, and the cinema,
their first wedding anniversary, which was approaching, the holiday they were going to take, and how it would be.

She stood up, walked through to the sitting room and crouched in front of the record player. A thick plank of sun lay across the dining table illuminating the wreckage of their evening meal, the dregs of wine in the opaque, smeary glasses, the congealed scraps on the uncleared plates.

She put on a record and stood up, humming along. And then, somehow, her mood, a phrase in the music, the sun on the table made the moment magically thicken and hold. For an instant she forgot where she was, her gaze unfocused and she seemed to see John, in her mind's eye, hurrying back to the flat. She saw the sunny street, the shiny cars, the comical way he was trying to read the newspapers as he walked, his arms full of groceries. The shadows the buildings cast were striped obliquely across the street, light and shade. John walked through gloom and glare toward her.