southerners will get their election. The President probably won’t get in, but whoever does will be under threat from the army from day one.’
‘A coup.’
‘The first thing any civil administration will want to do is weaken the army. Generals in the US don’t like that and they don’t like it here either.’
‘Is anybody talking about this kind of thing on the street?’
‘On the street they just want multi-party democracy. They don’t know what it means beyond free elections with more than one party, but they want it. Some of them think they know what it means but they don’t realize how much choice complicates things. They see France and Germany with democracy and they know how wealthy those countries are. So they think, if they’re rich, we’ll be rich. But there’re some big gaps and a lot can happen in the gaps.’
‘It’s gonna be a fuck-up, in other words,’ said Charlie, his voice thick with the drink.
‘It’s just the next stage. Africa’s been dominated by the Europeans and now it’s going to be dominated by their systems. It’s the only road.’
‘The only road they know is how to fuck things up.’
Charlie started pacing up and down the room. His forehead was glistening despite the air conditioning. Somebody had put a couple of bags of cement on my shoulders. I drank some more to see if it lightened the load.
Some hours later, which turned out to be minutes, Charlie stopped wearing a trail in the carpet and fixed me with a malevolent, drunken eye. Maybe I hadn’t been answering his questions, or maybe it was just the time of night when it occurred to him to start disliking company. I decided not to look back in case it stirred up his machismo and I caught the full force of Hurricane Charlie in an enclosed room. Wherever I did look, things either came towards me or I went towards them. I realized from the silence burning behind his eyes that the subject was going to change, and for the worse. As always with Charlie, it was going to get personal and it was going to be about sex.
‘How’s that babe of yours, Bru?’ he asked.
‘Heike, Charlie. Her name’s Heike.’
‘Yeah, Heike. Kraut, right? Ossa Kraut like inna sack?’
‘Maybe it’s time for me to go.’
‘Come on, Bru, ossa Kraut like inna sack? I went with a Thai chick once, she was tighter’n a duck’s ass.’
‘That’s not something I’d know about.’
‘On account of what, Bru?’
‘On account of English ducks are suspicious of people who come at them with that kind of thing in mind.’
Charlie poured some more whisky into my glass and topped up his own.
‘You think you’re smart,’ he said, shaking his head and panting a little from the alcohol crashing around his system. ‘English people. They think they’re smart. Nina. She likes English guys. Me? I think they’re all faggots. But Nina…when you meet her she’ll tell you she likes English guys. She says: “They don’t fuck you with their eyes.”’
‘Now that’s true, Charlie, once we’ve been told what to do it with, we remember.’
‘You don’t know when to shut the fuck up.’
‘I’m drunk. That’s what happens. It just keeps pouring out of me.’
‘I thought you could take it.’
‘I can. I like it and I can take it. But I can’t take it and keep my mouth shut.’
Charlie drank half his tumbler and nodded to me. I took a gulp which blazed its way down my oesophagus. He topped me up so that I had neat whisky to the brim and did the same for himself.
‘Cheers,’ he said, and took an inch off the top, to show me that the real men were on his sofa. ‘The first English guy I met was at my brother’s. My brother makes films in LA.’
‘What kind of films?’
‘Thrillers, comedies…’
‘Right, I was just making sure he wasn’t a Pasolini or anything.’
‘He does skin movies too, if he has to. Pays the bills.’ Charlie liked to talk tough.
‘The English guy?’
‘Yeah. My brother throws a party, like he has to, to get work now and again. It’s one of those parties, lot of girls. Lot of working girls, you know what I mean. They going round with the blow, little white piles of it on silver platters with spoons. I’m talking with these two guys. One of them is English. He’s a writer. Calls himself Al ‘cos he’s in the States. His real name is Algernon. What sort of a fucking name is that? Anyways, Al’s got a plate with some canapés on it. The girl comes round with the blow and Al picks up the spoon, loads it with blow and sticks it onna side of his plate. Then he says to the girl: “You got any celery to go with that?” Now that is what I call one big asshole.’
‘I laughed.’
‘I heard you,’ said Charlie. ‘You wanna see one of my brother’s films?’
‘No thanks, I got to go.’
‘It’s a short,’ said Charlie, leaning over, picking up the zapper and the TV came to life. There was a picture of African straw-roofed mud huts and two girls pounding yam.
‘This is Africa.’
‘This is Togolese TV, asshole.’
Charlie clicked on the video and a dark ill-lit picture came on in which only the movement of things could just be discerned.
‘Is this wildlife or something?’
‘Kinda.’
As the camera pulled back, Charlie turned the sound up and the telltale tinny music and sobbing ecstasy accompanied a shot of a woman laid out face down on a bench, her wrists and ankles tied underneath. A huge and hairy man who looked as if he drove trucks during the day held her thin waist in large and sinisterly gloved hands while he worked on her from behind. Another man sat in dazed concentration at the other end of the bench with the woman’s head nodding in his lap.
‘Good night, Charlie,’ I said, and lurched out of the room.
‘Good night, chickenshit,’ he shouted after me, without taking his eyes off the screen.
I needed some fresh air. Things appeared cut together like a film. There was no feeling of time passing. The dark corridor, the bird-like flower in the pot, the door, the warm wet darkness, the bar door. The bar door was locked. I walked down towards the sea.
I knew there was a steep bank of red earth down to the sandy beach but it was very dark and the bar was shut down so there was no light. I eased forward with one foot ahead of me until I felt stupid enough, then I stopped and looked out. My eyes got used to the dark. I was very close to the bank. It was closer to the bar than I remembered it. The sea was slowly eating its way into Charlie’s compound. It wasn’t going to be long before it all tipped into the Gulf of Guinea.
Standing in the dark was giving me sensory deprivation rather than sobering me up. I walked back to the bar; Charlie was still sitting in his living room, his brother’s film flickering on the screen. I fell heavily on my shoulder and kicked out at whatever I had fallen over, which groaned. I crawled back, and in the dim light I could just make out the slack features of the drunken Lebanese. I called the gardien and we hauled him up to the paillote, which left me speechless with a huge quantity of blood crashing through my head. The boy was covered in ants and his face and hands were swollen with mosquito bites. The gardien said he would put him in one of the guest rooms. After ten minutes, my pulse went back down from my ears to my wrist and I got in the car and drove back to Lomé.
There were street gangs operating in the centre