Blood Is Dirt (15 page)

‘I'm all here...' she said, now unable to conceal the distress. ‘I don't want to tell you this over the phone, but you have to know. Moses's blood-test results came today.' She struggled, the ugly angles of the words catching in her throat. No sound came out. She started crying. I put my elbow up on the desk and dropped my head into my hand. My bone marrow had gone cold.

‘He's HIV positive,' she said.

Lagos. Late Tuesday 20th February.

 

I crawled on to the hard bed in my cell at Y-Kays and lay there in the dark with an early-model air conditioner giving me the sensory deprivation I needed. I'd taken the precaution of a bottle of whisky in my room and drank fingers of the stuff without concentrating on the measures. A multicar pile-up built in my head. Before the wreckage was complete I put a call through to Gale, who surprised me by picking up the phone when she must have had a regiment of gofers to lift a finger for her.

‘Gull Strud—' I said, still on my back, my face and head numb as if I'd had four hours' root-canal work.

‘Who is this?' she snapped back.

‘Sorry, Gale Strudwick,' I said, sitting up and getting it out straight.

‘
I'm
Gale Strudwick, who the... who are
you
?'

‘I'd like to be able to say I'm all Bruce Medway but I'm only half here.'

‘Who's the other half?'

‘He's called Johnny Walker.'

‘Well, let me speak to him—he's always been the more interesting.'

‘Buh!' I said. She laughed. ‘Sorry, he's too far gone.'

‘That really is you,' she said. ‘Still getting shit-faced and it's way past your bedtime.'

‘I'm over forty now.'

‘Oh my God! I can't bear to think what you look like. You were so beautiful. Where are you?'

‘Lagos,' I said, ‘and thanks for the compliment, they're thin on...'

‘Where in Lagos?'

‘Adeola Hopwell, Vic Island.'

‘That's just round the corner. Why don't you...'

‘Because, Gale...'

‘Right. You're so shit-faced you don't know the difference between your poontang and your pecker.'

‘Those bankers have made you poetic.'

‘Yeah, I'm doing creative-writing lessons for assholes.'

‘Are you around tomorrow?'

‘Am I
around?'

‘At home.'

‘You mean rather than nipping down to the Sheraton for the Bruce Oldfield show, before hopping across town to choose the foie gras for luncheon, before zipping out to the beach, then cocktails, bridge at the club and dinner with my aunt. All that shit, you mean?'

‘Well...'

‘Nobody nips, hops or zips in this town. We hide behind walls, hover around panic buttons...'

‘Linked to the shrink,' I said. She laughed. ‘You're free, then?'

‘You know, I've missed that sledgehammer irony,' she said. A lighter clicked, a sharp intake of breath. ‘I'm at my best at eleven thirty, that's a.m. So come then. We'll have a few drinks and... a few more. Then maybe I'll let you have a sandwich. How's that sound?'

‘What do I get in my sandwich?'

‘Oh, I've got some fish paste in the back of a cupboard somewhere.'

‘Is that what you call caviare now?'

‘I'm
that
rich, Bruce,' she said, ‘but... yeah, anyway, what do you do with yourself these days?'

‘I meddle in people's affairs.'

‘How nice.'

‘I collect debts, recover losses, find people, uncover mysteries, rummage in drawers, lift up carpet corners, take husbands out of freezers before they get served for Sunday lunch...'

‘You're a PI,' she said.

‘Is the first word of that “Piss”?'

‘Right, see you tomorrow.'

I refitted the phone, got my head up for some more Scotch, but it leaked everywhere and ran down my neck into the pillow. I drifted into sleep, hollow and miserable, trying not to think too much about Moses.

I was stabbed awake later, terrified, as if I'd found myself in a mortuary fridge. I'd dreamt a dream with no pictures, just darkness and rippling over that an even blacker darkness. The air con was freezing, my trousers stiff. I kicked off my shoes, found a blanket, shivered and tried to think about lighter things, but they wouldn't come. So I tried nothing. Nothing wasn't allowed. Only blood was allowed. The deep dark, black arterial blood that thumps in the core of us and contains more than just cells and platelets.

Sleep came in the gash between night and dawn. I dropped fathoms in seconds and surfaced in minutes without the benefit of decompression. The phone was ringing so loud it was shaking me by the head.

‘Duh,' I said.

‘Bruce? Bagado.'

‘Guh.'

‘The trucking companies. I've got the names.'

‘Fuh.'

‘Pen?'

‘Nuh.'

‘Get one.'

‘Yuh.'

‘It's nine thirty Bruce.'

‘Not six?'

‘Not six. Two names. Get the pen.'

‘Right.'

‘Seriki Haulage, Awaya Transportation. Both of them are up by the Ojota Motor Park. I'm calling the Land Office now—you'd better get moving.'

He clicked off. I wrote the names on the Scotch bottle. I thought I'd been impaled on a railing. My neck and arm... and then it came back. The whole big, beautiful, blue yesterday came back to me. A vision wave set off down the room, hit the wall and slopped back up to me. I called reception and told them to send out a boy to get some over-the-counter analgesics. I made it to the bathroom and lay under the shower like a derelict in the last-resort city shelter.

By 10.30 I'd gone back to the basic principles of trousers and got into them. Minutes later I was behind a cup of coffee and thinking of other uses for the slab of sweet Nigerian bread. I found one. Covering the soft-boiled eggs.

After twelve hours' air con the heat outside was like walking into a warehouse of boiler lagging. I stabilized myself in the back of a cab and breathed back crises and counted palm trees. They were building security barriers at both ends of the Strudwicks' street. When the cab driver saw the state of the gates to the house he dropped me off.

I rang the bell and looked up at the video camera as instructed. Behind it a small sign said ‘This fence is electrified' and behind that were five pronged spikes along the wall and four strands of angled wire beyond them. It was not a light decision to shake this place down. A small door opened in the solid steel gates and a uniformed guard beckoned me on to the tarmac drive.

Inside, set back from the perimeter wall about fifteen feet, was another fence, a chainlink job with barbed wire on top.

‘Is that mined?' I asked the gateman.

He whistled. My ears rang. He looked down the run made by the fence. A cloud of dust appeared and out of it two black-and-tan monsters. They flung themselves against the chainlink which ballooned and bounced them back on to their size-twelve paws.

He ripped his cap and pointed me up the drive. The house wasn't visible. The tarmac drive snaked through huge mounds of hibiscus and was lined at intervals by fanned voyager palms which looked like unpaid attendants ready to cool the odd person on foot. I broke through a line of shrubs and headed across the lawn rather than put a mile on my hike by following the drive. The house was a large white cube with a flat roof and shuttered windows all encased by steel bars.

The solid mahogany door had a brass seahorse a foot long facing out of it. I was going to give it a swing but the door opened on Teflon hinges and a liveried boy took me through the house, which had the smell of a private collection. The stairs and the gallery above the entrance hall were sealed off tastefully by thick Spanish-style bars and the rooms off the gallery all had steel doors.

The boy and I burst through some French windows and trotted down stone steps to an Olympic-size pool. There were four wooden-framed calico awnings arranged at one corner, under which were some wrought-iron, pewter-coloured Roman campaign chairs with fat yellow cushions. They surrounded a wrought-iron table with a two-inch-thick piece of glass on top the size of a Harrods window. I sat at the table and watched a large, expensive-looking cat make its way around the pool.

The liveried boy left me, returned a moment later and hefted a twenty-pound ashtray on to the table. He placed a packet of Kent, a silver lighter and a little brass bell next to it. The cat approached, gave a disdainful left and right glance and hopped up on to the table. She nosed around a little and sat down. The pool lapped, the heat rapped, the birds stayed in the bushes.

‘Get off the table, Carmen!' Gale shouted.

Carmen flung a leg up in the air and set about washing her bottom.

‘Frigging cat,' said Gale. Carmen looked up briefly and went back to it.

Gale thumped into a chair and lit a cigarette. She tinkled the bell and straightened her sunglasses, which were two ovals suspended from a horizontal red wood line. Her long blonde hair crashed around her shoulders and her lipstick added a peach stripe to the white filter of her cigarette.

‘She's Graydon's,' she said, easing the lapel of her peach silk robe open and crossing her legs, which were still long and slim.

‘Graydon?'

‘Graydon Strudwick the third—husband.'

‘Fourth, surely?'

‘Fourth husband, third Strudwick.'

‘That's my first Graydon, I think.'

‘Graydon Hepplewhite Strudwick,' she said. ‘Not a Christian name in sight. Drink?'

‘I'll take a beer off you.'

‘Bring Mr Medway a beer, please, Ali.'

The name cut through the skeins of dead brain tissue.

‘Löwenbrau, Heineken, Budweiser or Labatts?'

I turned to look at Ali and was thrown to find it wasn't the same boy who'd opened the front door. Ali was an older, bigger, tougher specimen and even in the purple-and-green-trimmed livery I could see that those shoulders belonged to David's little hard man.

‘Lowenbrau, please, Ali.'

‘A bottle of Veuve Cliquot on ice and two flutes, Ali. Go.'

‘Veuve Cliquot,' I said out loud, straight in from the pueblo.

‘For the Veuve Strudwick,' she said. ‘I feel like a goddamn widow out here. Oh my Gad!' She ripped off her sunglasses. I sat forward expecting a body to float to the surface of the pool. She leaned over and kissed me on the lips firmly with nothing in it. ‘I forgot to say hello. Jesus. I see the same assholes day in day out I can't even raise a sneer. I'm sorry, Bruce, forgive me.'

‘It'll cost you your first born.'

‘You got a lo-o-o-ong wait.'

She gnawed at the arm of her sunglasses and sat down. Her peach robe was open all the way down now. She wasn't wearing underwear and the bikini waxing had been drastic. She smiled at me and slowly folded the robe over herself.

‘What does a poor little rich girl do with herself all day?'

‘You tell me, my imagination's dry right now.'

She put her sunglasses back on and bit a thumb. Ali brought the drinks. The Lowenbrau sweated while Ali popped the Veuve and filled a flute with a practised trickle. He backed away. We drank. I cried.

‘How is it with number four?' I asked.

‘OK... to begin with. The money's great. The sex
was
good. We came here. The end.'

‘The money still looks good.'

‘Yeah, but we're here.'

‘You were in Abidjan before with Grant.'

‘I didn't like that either. Something happens to guys when they get out here. They make dough like you wouldn't believe, they chew fat with ministers, they kiss our ruler's ass, they get to feel all important and then the rest of their lives look like fat-free frigging milk.'

‘But do you love the guy?'

‘Love? You still reading novels and poetry and shit?'

‘You don't love him. Leave him. You've done it before.'

She rubbed her money fingers at me.

‘And, hey, I'm not so young any more. I mean you, you're handsome. OK, so you lost your beauty but at least you're kinda rugged, good-looking. Me? I'm getting like a wrinkly old red capsicum.'

‘You'll get a settlement.'

‘PNA. That's prénuptial agreement to you, and thanks for disagreeing.'

‘The PNA's got to be more than a ten spot a week.'

‘I get the house on Kiawah Island and two hundred thou... a year, Bruce, a goddamn year. I need that a month.'

‘The tears are welling, Gale.'

‘That's because you're cheap. Anyone in the US'll tell you they need ten mil to quit.'

‘And Graydon's got that kind of salad?'

‘The guy's got green fingers. What d'you think we're here for?'

‘The sunshine and the rain?' ‘Oil.'

‘I thought he was a lawyer.'

‘The kinda law he was doing out here was guys'd call him from the john and ask if they could zip up without getting caught. I mean, Jesus. He doesn't mess with that stuff any more. The guy moves for his own account. He kisses ass where he has to and shovels it away.'

‘You ever come across a guy called Napier Briggs in any of his stuff?'

‘Sure,' she said, without thinking about it, ‘Napier was one of Graydon's brokers.'

She stood up then and moved off as if she'd had an idea that needed walking about. She rearranged her robe and smoothed it over her buttocks that were still as taut as a teenager's—the word ‘cellulite' not allowed in the house.

‘I'm still all there, Bruce,' she said, used to having men's eyes on her. Insulted if they weren't. ‘You had your chance way back and you blew it.'

She was referring to a time back in London when she'd sat next to me in a bar, bought me a whisky sour and asked, straight out, if I wanted to have sex with her. I said I'd like some small talk about poetry and ballet first. She'd said she didn't have the time. She was competing with a friend to see who could bed the most men in twenty-four hours. I passed. She gave me her number in case I changed out of a pumpkin before midnight. I didn't, but I had seen her again. She'd won with twelve.