“Oh, right, sorry. A proper little Eton College you had down there,” Fogwill said, still mocking and not seeming to notice Hock’s indignation.
Hock said, “So what have you been doing for the past forty years?”
“This,” he said, sitting upright, and he pulled a face, as though he’d just performed a successful trick. He called out to the man at the espresso machine. “Have I not, Mario?” But he become serious and said, “Remember my last duchess? That village beauty from Fort Johnson, Yao by tribe. We had three kids. She got fed up with the politics and swanned off to the UK. She’s still there, in a nice council flat in Bristol. My kids are married. I’m a grandfather, can you believe it?” He looked teasingly at Hock and said, “You never came to town. We had to hump all your katundu to you in the bush.”
Hock said, “I took the train up to see Haile Selassie. Ten hours in third class.”
Fogwill said, “The train’s not running anymore.”
“I was happy in the Lower River.”
Fogwill said, “Things are different now.”
“In what way?”
“I used to leave my house unlocked back then.”
“So you lock it now?”
“Not that it does a whit of good. I’ve been broken into so many times there’s nothing left to steal.”
“That’s life in the big city.”
“I live in the bundu,” Fogwill said. “Unlike our friend here.”
The man Mario had served the cups of coffee and was sitting, listening to Fogwill. Now Mario said, “Me, I’m no like the bush.”
“It’s a thirty-minute drive,” Fogwill said. “It suits me. Besides, I can’t afford anything else. The land belonged to my wife’s brother. He died of HIV. I’m educating his youngest son.” And as if seeing Hock for the first time, he smiled and said, “So, what brings you here?”
“Going to the Lower River.”
“No one goes there now. I haven’t been down there for yonks.” He sipped his cup of coffee, holding it daintily with tremulous fingers. He said, “Not much has changed here. Except we don’t have the old man anymore, and they kill albinos and make them into medicine, and they look for virgins to deflower — cures AIDS and the pox and heaven knows what, the dreaded lurgy, I fancy, though you’d be jolly lucky to find a virgin between here and Karonga.”
“I’m going south,” Hock said. The only way he had ever been able to deal with the teasing ironies of English people like Fogwill was to conceal himself in his stereotype and be as literal-minded as they believed Americans to be.
“Are you in possession of trade goods and shiny beads? Never mind, all they want is money. Or a mobile phone.”
“No cell phone,” Hock said.
“Astonishing.” Fogwill finished his coffee and smacked his lips and signaled for another. “You look smart. I once had a safari suit like that. Stout shoes. Bush hat. You look the part.”
“It’s just a short vacation.”
“I came for a short vacation forty years ago and I’m still here.” He looked through the café window into the street. “Buggered if I know why.”
He had the gargoyle features of a castaway, and the clothes too, his shirt faded and patched, his shoes torn and repaired with wide stitches on one toe, sutures of waxed twine in the leather, a specialty of the market cobbler.
As though to distract attention from his appearance, Fogwill began to tell a story about a recent night when he’d driven home drunk and fallen asleep in his car in the driveway of his house.
“The entire inside of the car was thick with masses of green beer bottles, curiously empty, and for my sins I had a whacking great bruise on my bonce. I woke to an impertinent whickering — my servant, cheeky bugger, wailing ‘Bwana! Bwana! Time for your tea!’ I was of course deliciously foxed…”
His houseboy, seeing him asleep in his car, pulled him out and dragged him to his bedroom, stripped off his clothes, and put him to bed.
That was the story in a sentence. But Norman told it as a lengthy, lisping farce, with digressions and humorous self-mockery. It was a good story, and in the time it took him to tell it, Mario served him his second cup of coffee and made his much-pondered chess move.
And Ellis thought: A story is a way of making life bearable. It was in general the English way, as he had experienced it among the expatriates. They would take a small disgraceful incident, remove the context, which was the great green frame of Africa, and make it a tale, choosing a few elements and adding droll phrases such as “curiously” and “for my sins” until it became a substitute for a stretch of monotony, or in Norman’s case, forty years of futility, living in a hut, abandoned by his African wife and children. He wanted to prove that he was not humiliated, not ignored, not counterfeit, not embittered, just killing time in this seedy town of ambiguous smells. He was a character in his own comedy. If you didn’t have a story, you hadn’t lived. The raggedness didn’t matter. What mattered was that Norman rescued a shred of dignity by relating the tale, depicting himself as a silly, forgivable drunk, tended to by a jungle Jeeves.
The manner of his telling it mattered too, in his plummy accent, made plummier by his living in the African bush. But Hock knew what those stories were worth. He could even translate them. “House” did not mean house; it meant a leaky hut. “Car” meant jalopy, “servant” meant skinny boy, and “tea” did not mean a meal but rather a crust of bread or a stale Kandodo cookie.
Hock was reminded why he had gone happily to the Lower River, why he had stayed there, why he was returning there now.
Fogwill said, “Know what you should do? Head up to the lake. A couple of nice hotels have opened up there — not the backpacker ones, but tourist lodges. You can swim, you can hire a fishing guide, you can just lie in a hammock all day and stay squiffy. You’ve got the money for it.”
Hock said, “But I’m going to the Lower River.”
“Then abandon all hope.” Fogwill smiled again, and gestured, as if to say, “What are we going to do with this bloke!” But his one tooth and his sunken cheeks and frailty only made him seem pathetic.
“Or you could sample the delights of Blantyre.”
“I did that last night. What’s it called — the Starlight?”
“Also the Izo Izo in Mbayani,” Mario said.
“Oh, come on, you’re past it, same as me,” Fogwill said, his eyes flashing in anger.
“What interested me,” Hock said, because he was embarrassed by Fogwill’s saying that, “what I couldn’t help noticing, was that the girls were so well dressed. And they were wearing shoes.”
“First time I ever went to the Flamingo — remember that bar, on the Chileka Road? I was courting my wife. Manager says, ‘Can’t bring her in here. No shoes.’ I gave him a right bollocking, but he wouldn’t budge. No one had shoes!”
“Was like that in Eritrea,” Mario said. “Assolutely.”
“He’s another refugee, by way of Nairobi,” Fogwill said.
Hock said, “What’s the road like to the Lower River?”
“Tarmac as far as Chikwawa and then you’re on your own. Shaketty-shaketty-boom. You should go up to the lake. Have a holiday.”
“I didn’t come here for a holiday,” Hock said.
This sharpness seemed to awaken something in Fogwill’s memory, because he smiled again and shifted in his chair and said, “Independence — it was the biggest day this country has ever seen. We had the mother and father of a party at the consul’s house and all you teachers were invited. The place was packed. Huge celebration. I says to one of your blokes, ‘Well, this is one way of getting you buggers out of the bush.’ He says to me — I’ll never forget this—‘There’s someone missing.’