On The Yankee Station_ Stories Part 10

Cherylle: tall, bony, a shock of wild blond hair. Twenty-five years old? Typically Californian flawless skin. I find her an oddly attractive girl without really being able to say why-a product of the curious vectors of a face: the arc of an eyebrow, the prominence of a cheekbone. There is a simmering feral gleam in her gaze, a sense of coiled, ticking energy within her which only truly strikes you on a third or fourth meeting.

Lamar, however, claims he spotted it instantly and it was this he found irresistibly attractive. I should say that Lamar has since become my closest friend out here on the Coast. Looking back through my diary I see I first described him as "a characteristically butch American businessman. Late thirties, handsome, tanned and stocky. Tough as a hill. Self-confidence surrounds him like a force field. The youngest vice-president in the company, responsible for sales and marketing. They say AOD will be his before the decade's out." Now that I know him I would say that this is only partially true. Lamar still exudes this brash ease but it's something of a facade. He is no typical VP; he works hard at his job because that is all his background and education have trained him to do. He has his idiosyncrasies and I find him both stimulating and sad.

For example, the fact that I write-albeit commercially-for a living has prompted him to attack the cultural lacunae in his life with the same vigour he applies to chase after contracts. He sees me as some sort of intellectual guru, a source to be tapped and exploited. Quite early on in our friends.h.i.+p he suggested we read through Shakespeare together "because they say he's the best." To feed this new enthusiasm I gave him reading lists and drew up programmes for his educational self-improvement. He proved to be a sensitive and intelligent student, surprisingly perceptive. He would question me so endlessly I felt exhausted, victim of some nightmare seminar, dizzy from the rapacity with which he plundered my brain.

His friends.h.i.+p with Cherylle did not affect the growth of our own. Indeed the three of us often went out together. And as the two of them became swiftly more infatuated, my presence paradoxically seemed all the more essential. I became the talisman of their affair, as if they needed the constant rea.s.suring presence of the catalyst that had started the reaction off.

I have, however, tried to talk to Lamar about the wisdom of this wedding-gently councilled delay. Cherylle is an incandescent but mercurial character, wayward and, I suspect, deeply uncertain of herself. But Lamar will not listen. He is in love, he insists, wholly in love for the first time in his life.

11 August 1973 The wedding. Lamar and Cherylle get riotously drunk. At the civic hall Cherylle arrived in thigh-length suede boots, jeans and a bright-yellow windcheater. She dresses in a bizarre series of fas.h.i.+ons-sometimes glaring lack of taste, sometimes s.h.i.+ning with demure chicness. Hardly the wife for a rising vice-president, I would have thought, but Lamar seems to accept her extravagances with a wide-eyed, ingenuous thrill.

Now I know her better I take Cherylle's lurid anthology of styles to be evidence of a chronic insecurity in her personality. She teeters on the brink of moods with the practised equilibrium of the perennially schizoid. Lamar, somehow, responds to this. His marriage to Cherylle is the one publicly irrational event in his entirely ordered life. He told me once he understood her perfectly, could predict her moves and responses with a Pavlovian confidence. He underestimates Cherylle, I think, and I am a little concerned. He has never displayed such verve and elation, but this is no Platonic union of opposites. Lamar's efficient diurnal parade has broken up to join Cherylle's Mardi Gras-and it likes the headlong pace.

14 August 1973 Working steadily for the last two days in the beach house. Windless, l.u.s.trous weather. Postcard from Lamar and Cherylle honeymooning in Mexico. Lamar's neat printed script overlaid at the foot of the card by some illegible felt-tip scrawl from Cherylle. Lamar says I would "love the art." Is he being ironic? I suspect it's a sop to our abandoned educational sessions-maybe he's feeling guilty. They didn't stand much chance against the potent lure of Cherylle's callow, hard-edged embrace.

18 August 1973 Lamar and Cherylle returned this morning, tanned and restless, deeply bored by Mexico. They stayed for lunch. Their evident intoxication with each other is off-putting, to say the least. Lamar was unshaven and in a T-s.h.i.+rt. There were bags under his eyes. I've never seen him like this.

Their self-absorption has its curious aspects too. Judging from the hints Lamar dropped about their days in Mexico, it seems that it only functions non-destructively when observed by a third party. He alluded to uncouth nights of violent, manic rows and equally violent and manic reconciliations. He calls it "kamikaze love" and describes it as a mixture of "laughter and pistol shots"-which is quite good for Lamar. He claims he finds it entirely invigorating.

I suspect I am to be enrolled as resident third party: token voyeur of their lambent encounters. I'm not sure I welcome the role; I sense this self-destruct mechanism poised inside Cherylle and it makes me uncomfortable. For example, she was quiet and affectionate all afternoon; then she swam worryingly far out to sea. "Trying for Catalina Island" was all she said when she returned exhausted. They left about eight in the evening heading for some dim bar on the Strip.

19 August 1973 To the downtown offices of AOD to present the first draft of my package. Looked in on Lamar but his office was empty. His secretary said you could never tell when he'd be in these days. Over lunch with some of his colleagues I found that Cherylle was the prime topic of conversation. There's a certain smug satisfaction evinced over the changes she's wrought in Lamar; normally the paradigm of the totally committed company man, he now delegates more and more, and his faultless punctuality has degenerated to amnesiac randomness.

23 August 1973 Drove up the coast with Lamar and Cherylle in their new car, a preposterously large white Buick convertible. An unusual vernal, sappy feel to the day-all the colours seem unfledged and new. Cherylle was at her most entrancing, telling us stories of her attempts to break into the movies. Looking at Lamar, I see devotion lodged in every feature. He seems not to listen to her words, but rather watches her forming them-noting every smile, eye gleam, pout and hair-toss like some fervent anthropologist.

On the beach Cherylle changed into a skimpy scarlet bikini and we took photographs of each other. Lamar had given her an expensive camera as a present and we played with its delayed exposure device, taking endless reels of the three of us in absurd vaudevillian poses, throughout which Cherylle flirted shamelessly with me. Lamar-a little subdued, I thought-later moved up to the dunes with the telephoto lens. I saw him up there, obsessively sniping shots of her as she oiled herself and sunbathed.

When we got back home I found myself drained and exhausted from the sun and the fervid high spirits. Lamar and Cherylle wanted me to come and "cruise bars." Lately their favourite pastime, it lasts all night-an intoxicating carnival snaking through the seamier side of the city. I begged off-I scarcely had the energy for a shower. I don't know how they can keep this pace up.

4 September 1973 Lamar phoned and asked in a morose voice if he could come round and have a talk. Alone. I hadn't seen him or Cherylle since that day at the beach and I wondered what was going on. He looked something like his old self-neater, back in a suit. Apparently word had come down from the higher echelons that the honeymoon was over. The postures of his body, however, struck att.i.tudes of despair and gloom. Things were not going well. Cherylle hated to be on her own now that he had to be regularly at work. On one of their bar cruises they had met a young hippie-actor friend of Cherylle. He had stayed the night and was still there. "He's a remarkable sort of guy," Lamar insisted, unconvincingly. "Only I wish he and Cherylle didn't laugh so much together." Kick him out, I advised. No, Lamar said, no. Cherylle wouldn't like that. My heart went out to him. We sat on and talked a bit longer, Lamar feigning unconcern, but with his strong shoulders slumped, his kamikaze love in a screaming death dive, the end of his fabulous amours, his brief bright horizon dimmed by valedictory clouds.

11 September 1973 I arrived home at the beach house this evening to find Lamar there waiting. I knew from his blank eyes Cherylle had gone. "Took the white Buick," Lamar said, his voice numbly monotone, "and everything in the house they could hock. No note, nothing."

I poured him a drink. She was young, I said, headstrong. She'd be back soon, to apologise, wanting to be forgiven. As he left, Lamar gripped my arm fiercely. "You know," he said evenly, "I can't face it. If she doesn't come back." I rea.s.sured him. I'd lay odds I said-five days, ten at the most. Wait until the money ran out, the binge was over.

29 September 1973 Lamar looks pale and sick. He hardly sleeps, he says. He has hired a private detective to look for Cherylle. Apparently everyone at work has been most understanding. Now that Cherylle has been away for three weeks, sympathetic consolation has turned to worldly reasoning. You're better off without her, his colleagues declare with firm logic. Think of your career-be objective-did she really really fit in? Yeah, anyone could see there was something unstable there. h.e.l.l, Lamar, they said, she's done you a fit in? Yeah, anyone could see there was something unstable there. h.e.l.l, Lamar, they said, she's done you a favour favour.

But Lamar, it was obvious, would never agree. He spent more and more time at my place tirelessly rerunning the scenario of his brief courts.h.i.+p and marriage as if he were trying to unlock some code the memories contained. A bleak dawn often broke on these disconsolate monologues: me in a half-doze; Lamar, his head in his hands, eyes staring emptily out to sea as if searching the sombre distance for an answer.

5 October 1973 10.30 P.M P.M. A call from Cherylle. Would I meet her in the forecourt of a filling station not far from my house. Ah, I thought, I am about to be enrolled as mediator. However, Cherylle was proud and unrepentant. The Buick was parked at the kerb. Her boyfriend leaned against it just out of earshot. Cherylle looked more wild and unkempt. She gave me the keys to the car and an envelope of money. "Tell him to keep away," she said. "I owe him nothing now." I was puzzled and a little angry. "What about an explanation?" I said. "Why did you do it?" She laughed. "n.o.body could take that kind of a relations.h.i.+p," she said. "I was like some kind of dog, a pet dog. It would have killed me."

When I got home I called Lamar and told him about our meeting. He came right over. When he saw the car and the money he broke down for the first time. I took him home, told him to get some sleep and said I'd be round the next day. He behaved like the victim of some appalling accident, a focal point for ma.s.sive stresses.

14 October 1973 Much of my spare time over the last few days has been spent with Lamar. Our conversation on all other topics except Cherylle is desultory and half-hearted. There has been no further word from her.

Lamar is driven on remorselessly by his obsession. Now that her presence has been removed from him he h.o.a.rds items of her clothing like religious treasures, the ba.n.a.l relics of a consumer saint. He carries around with him a cheap Zippo lighter engraved with her name, and a disposable powder compact which he is forever touching and examining like some demented votary.

We drive around at night to the bars they visited, in the vague hope of spotting her. Every distant blonde is excitedly approached until the lack of resemblance becomes clear. His moods on these occasions oscillate wildly, a leaping seismograph of elation and despair.

One day we drove back to the beach we had visited. Lamar sat in what he felt was the exact spot, raking the sand with his fingers like an insane archaeologist, finding only the cellophane wrapper of a cigarette pack and the plastic top of a tube of sun oil. Then two nights ago he asked me to come with him to Lake Folsom, where he and Cherylle had spent a weekend. We wandered aimlessly through the resort complex and then went down to the marina. There, Lamar stopped to talk to an old boatman who had rented them a cruiser for the day. He said he remembered Cherylle and asked for her. When Lamar told him what had happened he spat bitterly into the lake. He scrutinised the ripples he had caused for a few seconds and then said, "Yeah. I seen 'em all." Then he paused. "I seen 'em all here," he went on. "Fame, fornication and tears. That's all there is."

Lamar seemed profoundly affected by this piece of folk-wisdom and repeated the remark approvingly to himself several times on the journey home.

17 October 1973 A surprise invitation to Lamar's for dinner. There were just the two of us. He tells me that after considerable thought he has eventually filed for divorce. He seems calmer but the br.i.m.m.i.n.g self-a.s.surance that was there has not returned. The old solidity, too, seems a thing of the past; there is a slight lack of ease-a convalescent's awkwardness-in his movements. After dinner he brought out all the s.h.i.+ny photos he had taken of Cherylle. He flicked through them once and then burnt them. He pointed to a slowly curling Kodachrome. "Cherylle, that day at the beach...remember the swimsuit?" Then he smiled, embarra.s.sed. "I'm sorry," he said. "I know it's absurdly melodramatic, but at least I feel it's over now."

We went out later to buy some cigarettes. On our way back we saw a girl in a yellow window crying over a typewriter. "Think Cherylle's crying for me?" he asked harshly. I said that she might be. "No, she's not," he said firmly. "Not Cherylle."

23 October 1973 I was woken early this morning by the police. They said Lamar wanted me. Outside, he sat in the back seat of a police car. "They've found her," he said. "They want me to identify. Will you come with me?"

Cherylle's decomposing body had been found in a shack at an abandoned dude ranch out in the desert near a place called Hi Vista. There was no sign of the hippie-actor friend. Apparently it had all the indications of a half-fulfilled suicide pact. There was a note with both their signatures, but the police suspected that after Cherylle had pulled the trigger her lover had panicked, had second thoughts about joining her and had fled.

The deep irony was not lost on Lamar. He stood unmovingly as the policeman pulled back the blanket and there was only a slight huskiness in his voice as he identified her body.

2 November 1973 Lamar has just moved back to his flat. He had been staying with me since the inquest. The hippie has still not been tracked down. Lamar has been a moody and taciturn companion, not surprisingly, but he is not the broken man I expected him to be. There is a kind of fatalistic resignation about him, he talks less obsessively about Cherylle and I'm glad to say seems to have abandoned his mementoes. However, it has to be said that he is nothing like the person he was a few short months ago and he told me yesterday he planned to resign from the company. He keeps saying that Cherylle couldn't have been happy, so it was just as well that she ended it all. "She couldn't have been happy," he will say. "Not Cherylle. If she couldn't be happy with me, how could she possibly be happy with anybody else?" To Lamar's numbed brain the logic of that statement appears incontrovertible.

8 November 1973 A dull smog-shrouded day of rain. By mistake the police forwarded on Cherylle's personal possessions to my house, a.s.suming Lamar was still staying here. A patrol car dropped them off early in the evening and I said I would make sure Lamar got them. There was a nylon suitcase full of crumpled clothes and a plastic bag of loose items. I laid them on the kitchen table and thought sadly of Cherylle. Cherylle, in her satin pants...her orange lips, her white-blond hair. And now? A few grubby clothes, a wooden hairbrush, sungla.s.ses, a Mexican purse, a charm, a powder compact and a Zippo lighter with her name engraved on it...

I finally caught up with Lamar at a burger dinette down on the seafront not far from his apartment. It was still raining heavily. He sat at a table in the window surrounded by wax-paper wrappers and empty bottles of beer, gazing out at the pa.s.sing trucks on the coast highway. A red tail-light glow lit his eyes.

I placed the Zippo and the compact in front of him on the table. "Why did you do it?" I asked. He hardly looked surprised. He gave a momentary start before resuming his scrutiny of the pa.s.sing traffic.

"They were hers," he said dully. "I didn't want them any more so I just put them back in her bag."

"But why, Lamar? Why?" His woodenness infuriated me. "Why Cherylle?"

He looked at me as though I'd asked a stupid question. "She wasn't ever coming back, you know? But I found out where she was. I begged her on my knees to come home. But that hippie wouldn't let her go. I tried to buy him off, but he wasn't interested. And I couldn't let her leave me for someone like that-for anyone. I had to do it, so I set it up that way."

"What about him? The hippie?"

"Oh, he's out there in the desert. No one's going to find him in a long time."

Lamar smiled a bitter smile and traced a pattern in the wet Formica round his beer bottle. A young Hispanic waitress approached for my order, carrying her boredom like a rucksack. I waved her away. I wanted to get out of this melancholy bar with its flickering neon and clouded chrome.

I had reached the door when I felt his hand on my shoulder.

"You can tell them if you like. I don't care." He looked at me tiredly.

I felt my voice thick in my throat. "Just tell me one thing," I said. "I want to know how you feel now. Feel tough, Lamar? Feel n.o.ble? Come on, what's it like, Lamar?"

He shrugged. "Remember that play we read once? 'I'll sacrifice the lamb that I do love'? That's how it is, you know? It's like the song says-love hurts. It gets to hurt you so much you've got to do something about it."

It was all the explanation I would ever get. He stood in the doorway and watched me walk to my car. Tyres swis.h.i.+ng on the wet tarmac, the road s.h.i.+ny like vinyl, the rain slicking down his short hair. As I drove off I could see him in the rear mirror, still standing there, a lurid burger sign smoking above his head. I never saw him again.

The Coup

Isaac knocked at his door at half past three in the morning. It took Morgan a few minutes to wake up; then he washed, shaved and put on his light-weight tropical suit. He was going home.

The verandah was cluttered with the trunks and packing cases that were being s.h.i.+pped back to England separately by sea. Morgan ate his breakfast among them in a mood of quite pleasant melancholy. He gazed across the empty sitting room and at the bare walls of his bungalow and thought about the three years he had spent in this stinking sweaty country. Three rotting years. Christ.

He was still thinking about how much he wouldn't miss the place when the car from the High Commission arrived at half past four. Morgan registered a twinge of annoyance when he saw that instead of the air-conditioned Mercedes he'd requested, he'd been issued with a cream Ford Consul. It was three and a half hours from Nkongsamba to the capital by road; three and a half hours of switchbacked, pot-holed h.e.l.l through dense rain forest. It seemed that his last hours in this wretched country were destined to be spent in the same perspiring, itching agony that so coloured his memories of the past three years. Typical of the b.l.o.o.d.y High Commissioner, thought Morgan, not b.l.o.o.d.y important enough for the Merc. Trust the little asthmatic bureaucrat to notice his transport application. He'd wanted the Merc desperately; to strap-hang in air-conditioned comfort, the Union Jack cracking on the bonnet. Go out in style-that had been the plan. He looked critically at the Consul; it needed a clean and one hub cap was missing, and and they'd given him that imbecilic driver Peter. Morgan rolled his eyes heavenwards. He couldn't wait to leave. they'd given him that imbecilic driver Peter. Morgan rolled his eyes heavenwards. He couldn't wait to leave.

He said goodbye to Isaac, and Moses his cook, and Moses' young wife Abigail, who helped with the was.h.i.+ng and ironing. He'd given them all a sizeable farewell dash the previous evening and he noticed they were smiling hugely as they energetically pumped his hands. b.l.o.o.d.y gang of Old Testament refugees, he thought, slightly put out at the absence of any sadness or solemnity; they'd never had it so good. He cast his eye fondly over Abigail's plump, sleek body. Yes, he'd miss the women, he admitted, and the beer.

It was still quite black outside and a couple of toads burped at each other in the darkness of the garden as he eased himself onto the s.h.i.+ny plastic rear seat, gave a final wave, and told Peter to get going. They sped off through the deserted roads of the commercial reservation and pa.s.sed quickly through the narrow empty streets of Nkongsamba before striking what was laughingly known as the transnational highway.

This particular road was a crumbling two-lane tarmacadam death trap that meandered through the jungle between Nkongsamba and the capital. A skilfully designed route of blind corners, uncambered Z-bends and savage gradients, it annually claimed hundreds of lives as the worst drivers in the world sought to negotiate its bizarre geometry. The small hours of the morning were the only time when it was anything like safe to travel-hence Morgan's early rise, even though his plane left at half past eleven.

As a citron light spread over the jungle, Morgan reflected that they hadn't made such bad progress. With the windows wound full down the speeding car had been filled with a cool breeze and Morgan barely sweated at all. As expected, the roads had been quiet. They had pa.s.sed the still-guttering remains of a crashed petrol tanker and once had been forced off the road by a criminally overloaded articulated lorry, its two huge trailers towering with sacks of groundnuts, as its bonus-hunting driver, high on kolanuts, barrelled down the middle of the road en route for the capital and its busy port.

All in all a remarkably uneventful journey, thought Morgan as they raced through a town called s.h.a.gamu, which marked the halfway stage. But then it was only a matter of a few miles farther on, the sun's heat concentrating, Morgan's b.u.t.tocks and the backs of his ample thighs beginning to chafe and fret on the plastic seats, that they had a puncture. The car veered suddenly, Morgan threw up his arms, Peter shouted "Good Lord!" and he pulled onto the laterite verge.

After the steady rumble of their pa.s.sage on the tarmac, it was very quiet. The road stretched empty before and behind them, the avenue of jungle rearing up on either side like high green walls.

Peter got out and looked at the tyre, sucking in air through the prodigious gaps in his teeth. He grinned.

"Dis be poncture, sah," he explained through the window.

Morgan didn't budge. "Well, b.l.o.o.d.y fix it then," he growled. "I've got a plane to catch, you know."

Peter went round to the back of the car and threw open the boot. Morgan sat scowling, the absence of breeze through the car windows reminding him pointedly of the high humidity and the unrelenting heat of the early morning sun. He had a sudden agonising itch on his perineum. He scratched at it furiously.

Then Peter was back at the window.

"Ah-ah! Sah, dey never give us one spear."

"Spear? Spear? What b.l.o.o.d.y spear?"

"Spear tyre, sah. Dere is no spear tyre for boot."

Morgan climbed out of the car swearing. Sure enough, no spare. He felt an intolerable explosive frustration building up in him. This b.l.o.o.d.y country just wasn't going to give up, was it? Oh, no, far too much to expect to catch a plane unhindered. He gazed wildly around at the green jungle before telling himself to calm down.

"You'd better take the wheel back to s.h.a.gamu." He thrust some notes into Peter's hand. "Try and get it fixed. And hurry!"

Peter jacked up the Consul, removed the wheel and trundled it back down the road to s.h.a.gamu. It was too hot to sit in the car, so Morgan crouched on the verge in what little shade it offered and watched the sun climb the sky.

A few cars whizzed past but n.o.body stopped. The highway, Morgan grimly noted, was particularly quiet today.

Two and a half hours later, Peter returned with a repaired and newly inflated tyre. It took another ten minutes to replace it before they were on their way once more. Morgan's plane was due to leave in just over an hour. They would never make it. His face was taut and expressionless as they roared down the road to the airport.

The airport was situated on flat land about ten miles from the capital and was quite cut off, surrounded by a large light-industrial estate. As they drove past the small factories, freight depots and vehicle pools. Morgan again commented on the lack of traffic; everybody seemed to be staying away. Small groups of people gathered in the villages at the roadside and stared curiously at the cream Consul as it went by. Probably some b.l.o.o.d.y holiday, reasoned Morgan thankfully as he saw the signposts directing them to the airport. At least something was working in his favour.

Soon he saw the familiar roadside billboards advertising airlines and the exotic places they visited, and Morgan felt the first thrill of excitement at the thought of flying off home; the well-modulated chill of the aircraft, the crisp stewardesses and the duty-free liquor. He was straightening his tie as they rounded a corner and almost ran down a road-block.

The road-block consisted of three fifty-gallon oil drums surmounted by planks of wood. Parked to one side was a chubby armoured car, surrounded by at least two dozen soldiers wearing camouflage uniforms and armed with sub-machine-guns with sickle-shaped magazines.

Morgan stared in open-mouthed astonishment about him and at the airport buildings two hundred yards ahead. Four huge tanks were parked in front of the arrivals hall. Morgan noticed with alarm that several of the soldiers had levelled their guns at the car. Peter's face was positively grey with fear. A young officer approached with a red c.o.c.kade in his peaked cap. He politely asked Morgan to get out and produce his doc.u.ments.

"What's going on?" Morgan asked impatiently. "Is this some kind of an exercise? Terrorists? Or what? Look here"-he pointed to his ident.i.ty card-"I'm a member of the British diplomatic corps and I've got a plane to catch."

The young officer returned the doc.u.ments.

"This airport is now under the command of the military government..." he began, as if reading prompt-cards behind Morgan's head.

"What military government?" Morgan interrupted; then, as realisation dawned: "Oh, no. Oh, my G.o.d, no. A coup-it's a coup. Don't tell me. That's all I need, a b.l.o.o.d.y coup." coup." He raised his right hand to his forehead in an unconsciously dramatic gesture of despair. He felt he was getting a migraine. A bad one. He raised his right hand to his forehead in an unconsciously dramatic gesture of despair. He felt he was getting a migraine. A bad one.

Just then a BOAC staff car drove up from the airport buildings and a hara.s.sed official got out. After some conferring with the young officer he hurried over to Morgan.

"What on earth are you doing here, man?" he asked irritatedly. "Haven't you heard about the coup? This place has been like an armed camp since six o'clock this morning."

Morgan explained about his early start and the puncture. "Listen," he went on agitatedly, "my plane. Have I missed my plane? When can I get out of here?"

"Sorry, old chap. The last plane left here at midnight. The airport's closed to civil traffic. As you can see, there's not a thing here. This is what usually happens, I believe. n.o.body flies in or out for a few days until things have sorted themselves out. You know, until the radio blackout's lifted, the fighting stops and the new government's officially recognised."

"But look here," Morgan insisted, "I'm from the Commission at Nkongsamba. I've got diplomatic immunity, all that sort of stuff."

"I'm afraid that doesn't carry any weight at all at the moment," said the airlines official in an annoyingly good-humoured manner. "Britain hasn't recognised the new government yet. I'd hang on for a few days before you start claiming any privileges."

"Hang on! Good G.o.d, man, where do you suggest I hang on?"

"Well, you can't get back to Nkongsamba. They'll have road-blocks on the highway now, for sure. And there's a twenty-four-hour curfew on in the capital as well. So if I were you, I'd go to the airport hotel down the road. Show them your ticket. I suppose you're in our care now, after a fas.h.i.+on, and they'll bill the airline. I should think they'll be glad of the custom. Everyone else has kept well away, stayed at home. In fact you're the only person who's turned up to catch a flight today. I suppose you were just unlucky."

Morgan turned away. Unlucky. Just unlucky. Story of his life. He climbed morosely into the car and told Peter to take him to the airport hotel. Peter backed up with alacrity and they drove off.

The airport hotel was a mile away. They were stopped by a patrol on the road and Morgan again explained his predicament, flouris.h.i.+ng his pa.s.sport and ticket. He was sunk in a profound depression; the final bizarre revenge of a hostile country. The magnitude of his ill-fortune left him feeling weak and exhausted.

Morgan had stayed at the airport hotel several times before. He remembered it as a lively, cosmopolitan place with two restaurants, several bars, an Olympic-sized swimming pool and a small casino. It was usually populated by a mixed crowd of jet-lagged transit pa.s.sengers, air-crew and stewardesses and a somewhat raffish and frontier collection of bush-charter pilots, oil company troubleshooters and indeterminate tanned and bra.s.sy females whom Morgan imaginatively took to be the mistresses of African politicians, part-time nightclub singers, croupiers, hostesses, expensive wh.o.r.es and bored wives. It was as close as Morgan ever came to being a member of the Jet Set and a stay there always made him feel vaguely mysterious and highly s.e.xed. As they approached, he recalled how only last year he had almost successfully bedded a strong-shouldered female helicopter pilot, and his heart thumped in antic.i.p.ation. Every cloud, he reminded himself, silver lining and all that. That had to be the one consolation of a truly awful day.

The airport hotel was large. A low-slung old colonial edifice at the centre was lined by shaded concrete pathways to more modern bedroom blocks, the pool, the hairdressing salon and the other amenities. As they swept up the drive, Morgan looked about him with something approaching eagerness.

The large car-park, however, was unsettlingly empty, and Morgan noticed that the familiar troupe of hawkers who spread their thorn carvings, their ithyphallic ebony statuary and ropes of ceramic beads on the steps up to the front door were absent. Also there was an unnatural hush and tranquillity in the foyer, as if Morgan had arrived at the dead of night rather than midday. Sitting on squeaky cane chairs in front of the reception desk were two bored soldiers with small aluminum machine pistols in their laps. The clerk behind the long desk was asleep, his head resting on the register. One of the soldiers shook him awake and as Morgan signed in he noticed that only a few names were registered along with his own.

"Are you busy?" he asked with faint hope.

The receptionist smiled. "Oh, no, sah. Everybody gone. Only eight people staying since last night. No planes," he added, "no guests."

An aged bellhop with bare feet and a faded blue uniform showed Morgan to his room in one of the new blocks. Morgan was glad to find the air-conditioning still functioned.

The day's frustrations were not over. Morgan tried to phone the Commission in Nkongsamba but was informed that all the lines had been closed down by the army. He then went back outside and instructed Peter-who had elected to stay and live in the car in the car-park-to drive to the emba.s.sy in the capital and report Morgan's plight.

Peter shook his head with a convincing display of bitter disappointment.

"You can never go dere," he lamented. "Dey done build one big road-block for here," he gestured at a point a few yards up from the end of the hotel drive. "Plenty soldier. Dey are never lettin' you pa.s.s."

So that was it. Morgan looked at his watch. By rights he should be high over Europe now, a stewardess handing him his meal on a tray, an hour or so from an early evening touchdown at Heathrow Airport. Instead he was marooned in a deserted hotel complex while a military coup raged outside the gate.