a visit, I said. What takes you, Ray?
Frogget came out of the toilet and slammed his beer bottle down, spilling it on his fags and barging in on the conversation.
—Me? he said. You talking about me? I’ve bin out there a coupla times. Livin on the beaches with them lads that rip off tourists, you know, girls and all. I got a few down there, Malindi, Lamu. You just ask fer me in a bar. Say mzungu Frogget and make like you mean I drink a lot. I tell yer, when I’m down there I drink till I don’t know where the next one’s comin from. Couple o’months an I’ll be back ‘ome but not before I’ve whacked it in. Coke, smack, speed, White Cap, Tusker, anything yer like, me. Yeah, smack it up I do.
Ray leaned forward and said:
—You ever chewed that root?
—Mirrah, you mean?
—Yeah, that’s the stuff. Acid and mirrah. Couldn’ ‘andle that could they, them natives?
Frogget looked at Steve.
—Well Steve, he said. What you up to?
—Yeah Steve, Ray said. What turns you cuckoo?
Steve was still silent, turning a Rothman’s packet in his hands, lifting the flap, closing it, putting the packet down. He scratched his leg and sighed before biting his lip.
—Yeah, well, I dunno do I.
—Ah come on Steve, fuck me. You aint goin out there to Kenya to buy a fuckin ice cream, China, I know.
—Well, Steve said, to see what’s there I suppose. You know, this and that, here and there.
Ray slapped him on the back and said:
—Well that’s about all anyone can do isn’t it? That’s what I’m going for and I’ve seen it all before. He’ll get a girl. He’ll be alright.
I got up and walked off thinking what was so different about me? I was looking for a woman too wasn’t I?
Next day the bus took us out to the airport at twenty to midnight, bouncing across the frozen ruts. We were put back in the deserted glass corridors, let loose and ignored. Frogget and Ray were in a bar and Ray was beginning to stagger and sing Polish drinking songs, encouraged by the barmaids with their two-dollar vodkas. Steve was glassy-eyed and wanted to ask me something:
—D’yer reckon I could get to South Africa like, overland?
—Nah, Ray says. No one can. Not even him.
He pointed to an African at the other end of the bar then swayed towards him.
—You won’t even get out of Nairobi. Boukrah. That’s all they ever bleedin say there, boukrah. Tomorrow, always bleedin tomorrow. Isn’t that right friend?
Ray put his arm round the African’s neck and the African pushed it off.
—I’m not your friend. I don’t even know who you are.
—All Africans are my friends. You’re an African, all Africans are my friends, so you’re my friend because you need me.
—I don’t need you man.
—Yes you do, you need me to look after you. All Africans need me to look after them. I’m the white man and I say jambo bwana to the black man. I want you to love me.
He reeled against the wall, bounced off and fell against the African.
—I don’t want you to love me, white man. Get your hands off. Don’t touch me.
Frogget went over.
—Leave it Ray, you’re a public nuisance. You want some village people you should’ve said, man. Get on down to Lamu.
—No, Ray said, getting a hand on the African’s head. Let me kiss you, I want to kiss you, you’re my friend.
—Get off. Are you homosexual or something?
The African went to a table and sat down.
—Yeah, alright, I’ll be one. I don’t mind homosexuals, let me fuck you, come on I want to fuck you.
The African stood and caught Ray by the elbow.
—Fuck off man and leave me alone.
Ray fell against the wall.
—Blacks don’t have to like whites any more. You never seen a black man before?
—I’m just having some fun …
Ray went along the bar looking for his vodka.
—All these black pigs are the same. He’ll get over it.
One afternoon I found this German helmet while clearing the bank above the lavoir. Joy had been gone three days, but when I looked back down the chemin at Le Haut Bois nothing told me she’d ever been there. No window steaming as the kettle boiled, no Joy packing logs in the basket, no scubbing of her wellingtons on brittled mud. So I kept away from that house, letting the phone ring and the door clap in a pealing wind. It scraped through the barns day and night and drove sleet-rash into my face, preaching at my chapped lips and fingers.
I’d begun to landscape, starting by the lavoir the way me and Joy had meant to, but the earth was frozen shut. Every hamlet in France has a lavoir, a water source and washing place. Joy had wanted to turn ours into a water garden, to plant willows and excavate the stone walls and the granite slabs, but it was still a gullion of sludge, just a cow-hole for Monsieur Aunay’s beasts. The bank above was a snag of dead bramble, buckthorn and flailing whips of untrimmed ash, but I’d cleared halfway, tugging links of barbed wire fence from claws of grass where even the dirt was rusted. It was German Army wire, you could tell from the clips between barbs.
The helmet was under leaf-mould and lifted out like a bowl, leaving a smooth hollow of dry, configured roots. The leather webbing was complete, snapping as it eased free. And there, like a coronet, still recognisable after fifty-two years, were woven sprigs of lavender.
For a second, this soldier was more real to me than Joy, sitting in the meadow with his helmet capped on the fence-post as he scratched his head and guzzled stolen cider, the farm behind him ransacked. He’d splashed himself in the lavoir and filled his canteen from the trickling spring, ears drying in a stroke of summer. I held this rusty helmet with its Bosch-drop over the ear, picking out rust-wafers and sycamore leaves like fossils of extinct fish, running my finger round the bullet hole. He’d stood up, put the tin hat back on, the hole appearing as suddenly as the shot, straight through the daydream, killing him where the helmet fell.
I carried it back to the house at dusk, driven inside by the merciless cold. Because of the wind I was sleeping downstairs, rolled up in the duvet on the floor between the armoire and the woodstove, instead of adrift under the roof in our big empty bed. Up there the tiles slid away at night and splintered in the yard, like dreams of broken teeth. Even the glass out of the skylight took off and put a deep scratch down the side of the Land Rover.
The dark closed in and the moon shone hard as a mortuary light, flooding the room in formaldehyde sheen. I ate a bag of monkey nuts instead of cooking, and used the German helmet as a bowl for the empty shells. If I fell asleep before exhaustion the mice would wake me, pulling at my hair, so I set this corral of wooden mouse traps called Lucifers round the floor and slept inside it, only they snapped all night. Or the geese at their watch would wake me, running round the yard like Nazis in a daze, confused by the moon or in a panic over the two-foot-long coypu who kept a den in one corner of the mare and emerged at night like a submarine.
For several nights a smell had curled up into the house from under the floorboards. But now it detonated just as I settled down, so I put