Sex and Stravinsky (25 page)

‘
Je m’appelle Jacques
,’ he said and they shook hands.

‘
Moi aussi
,’ Jack said.

As they sat, a threesome over Miss Lundy’s buns and tea, the poet talked about himself. He had a white French father, an anthropologist from Nantes, who taught in Paris, but now he was dead.

‘My mother also,’ he said. ‘She is
descendue
from
l’aristocratie des
Wolof Kingdoms of Jolof.’

He drank his tea without milk. He did a lot of charming eye contact.

Jack, finding himself suddenly in want of a similarly interesting context, borrowed one from an old friend.

‘Mine are also dead,’ he said. ‘I was taken in by eccentric white Communists. My mother was from Beirut. She abandoned me as a baby and returned there to take the veil. Then the Israelis dropped a big bomb.’ With his hands he made graceful lotus gestures. ‘
Pouf
!’ he said. ‘
Boum
!’

The poet laughed. He did more charming eye contact. He gestured a big explosion.

‘
Boum-BOUM
!’ he said.

At the reading in the hall that afternoon, the poet intoned a sequence of his somewhat lengthy lyrics, which were based on Homer’s
Odyssey
; a West African odyssey to do with meanderings among Berber Arabs, Black Africans, Mediterraneans and Indo-Europeans. Some of the time he sang his lyrics – a thing he did without embarrassment, throwing his voice far into the hall. Since the poet’s English was not very good and the school’s French somewhat rudimentary, Miss Lundy had put Jack on the platform as translator, though she was there as back-up. So Jack and Jacques sat, heads together, sharing a microphone, sometimes bumping hands.

Once the event was over, the trio repaired to Miss Lundy’s rooms for dinner – a private dinner for which her lamb was cooked almost to rags on account of Jacques’s poetical offerings having been so very extended. It was clear by now to the French teacher that she had lost the poet to her pupil but, in truth, she no longer cared. His verses were, after all, not particularly good and his egomania had begun to disenchant. Its waning charm decreased with the man’s excessive loquaciousness, which was being exacerbated by drink, because the poet’s contribution to the evening meal had been a large bottle of duty-free whisky, which he drank unassisted by either one of his companions.

By halfway through the bottle, the poet was pushing aside the lamb shank on his plate. He was giving his audience an extended lesson in the care of his exquisite hair. He washed his hair like this, like that, he explained; never like that, like this. He combed it always exactly so. Never, ever, like so. And the only comb he had always to use – please to note – was this one. Observe. This was the only one he had always about his person. The comb was made of ivory. The teeth were of exactly such a depth; of such a width; spaced precisely so; the handle never too short; never too long. Always exactly so. To be used – observe – like this. The poet’s hair made an attractive halo around his head. He would have no truck with braids; even less with extensions. Never! His hair was all his own.

Miss Lundy had begun to yawn.

‘Jack,’ she said finally. ‘Jack.’ She spoke in whispers as they coincided in her kitchen. ‘I’m really sorry to ask this of you, but do you think you could get our guest to his room before he collapses here on me?’

So Jack, with his arm around the poet’s waist, the poet’s arm across his shoulders, proceeded with caution, step by step, along the path to the guest room across the garden and he wrestled Jacques in through the door. But the poet, suddenly upright, looked about him with interest. He resumed his state of animated wakefulness. He became coercively affable.

‘Please,’ he said. ‘Jack, please to sit.’

But Jack kept on standing. He saw that, on the bedside table, the poet had a second whisky bottle, which he soon began to uncap. He gathered a tumbler and a plastic mug from the bathroom, filled both, and took a hefty swig. He scrabbled within a cabin bag, from which he pulled out more poetry.

‘
Écoute-moi
,’ he said.

The poems were long and boring and Jack was very tired.

‘Come,’ the poet said, looking up in time to see him yawn. He was patting the bed beside him. ‘Pretty boy,’ he said.

‘
What?!
’ Jack said; touch-me-not Jack.

He took a step backwards towards the door, but the poet was quick to intercept him.

He was on his feet and breathing into Jack’s right ear.

‘I know why you are here,’ he said, and his breath, with its stale, grainy odour, was not unlike the smell of Jack’s grandmother’s home-made beer – albeit that the grains had been twelve years in the barrel.

Jack gave the poet a forceful shove, which had him tottering backwards, but he landed, quite softly, on the bed. For something like five seconds, he looked nonplussed. Then his expression changed to anger. He rose and grabbed at both his travel bags. He threw in his few scattered items and closed the zips. He pulled on his leather jacket and tried, without success, to stuff the whisky bottle into one of its pockets. Then he snatched up the car keys.

After that he turned to Jack.

‘I go,’ he said.

‘No,’ Jack said. ‘You can’t.’

‘I do not stay,’ said the poet. ‘I go where I am –
admire
.’

‘Please –’ Jack said.

‘I,’ said the poet, somewhat pompously, thumping his own breast, ‘I am more better than Rimbaud. And Rimbaud, he is more better than Apollinaire. You will regret,
mon ami
. You will regret.’

‘Please,’ Jack said. ‘Stay. It’s dark.’ He hesitated to observe that the poet was too drunk to drive the car. ‘Where will you go?’ he said.

‘Mozambique,’ said the poet. ‘
Bien sûr
.’

‘Look,’ Jack said. ‘The roads aren’t great. There are mountains and wild animals. You know. Game reserves. Big animals.’

The poet laughed. He darted forward and kissed Jack teasingly on the mouth; a brief assault of tongue and saliva that left Jack in shock.

‘
Au revoir
,’ he said and he was gone.

Jack wiped his mouth on his sleeve. He bolted the door. Then he sat down, stunned, on the poet’s bed. He heard the car’s engine start up in the car park. He waited, hardly daring to breathe. No lights flicked on in the body of the school. Nobody appeared to wake. He saw a brief arc of light cross the wall of the gym as the car reversed out of the parking bay. Then he stretched out on the poet’s bed with his hands under his head; numb, corpse-like, appalled.

‘Shit!’ he mumbled. ‘Oh shit, what now?’

He became aware that he was shivering and he wrapped himself in the poet’s duvet against the thin mountain air. Then he couldn’t stop yawning. His eyelids began to droop.

And when he woke, his bed seemed strangely aligned and the room was full of daylight. Jack saw that he was still in his clothes and that his shoes were on his feet. He sat bolt upright and looked at his watch. Thanks be to God, it was actually not that late. He hadn’t even missed breakfast. If he was quick about it, he could slip out of the poet’s room and fall unobserved into the slipstream of school life. And then, in the bathroom where he went for a first morning pee, he had yet another surprise. Oh my God. The poet’s leather travel purse – a small, A5-sized item – was lying on the cistern. Alongside it, were the poet’s ivory comb and his tortoiseshell glasses. Inside the purse were his passport, his return air ticket between Dar es Salaam and Dakar, his Visa Card and seven hundred US dollars. There was also a small notebook containing addresses and telephone numbers. Jack swished water through his teeth. He stuffed all the items into the wallet. Then he strode out of the guest room and closed the door behind him. His first port of call would be the staff room, where he was in hopes of catching Miss Lundy.

But something unscheduled was clearly going on. The school was not conforming to its usual morning routine. The teachers were not in the staff room. They were huddling in the foyer. There were two policemen in their midst and the talk was all of the poet. The car had been found, burnt out and turned over in a ditch. Material relating to the school – Miss Lundy’s material – scorched but not entirely illegible, had been found in the glove compartment. The poet was dead. Tickets, documents, personal effects were all irrelevant now. Jack moved off, not wanting to intrude. He stashed the travel purse in his locker and went to get himself some breakfast. Within the hour, the school had resumed its normal workaday schedule.

Days went by and then weeks. Nobody asked about the poet’s documents; nobody raised a question. After a month, as Jack approached his sixteenth birthday, the passport and the ticket had become his precious, secret things. Had it not been for the poet’s effects, Jack’s next two years would have been running their predictable schoolboy course, but now December had become his deadline. The air tickets had been issued by Kenya Airways. The flight was from Dar es Salaam on 15 December. He knew that by then he would be in Tanzania and that his hair would be quite a bit longer. He knew that he would be in Dar es Salaam. He would have got there by crossing the border into Mozambique with the help of one Pedro, who was friends with everybody; Pedro, whose telephone number was contained within the poet’s small notebook.

Before he inherited the documents, there was little chance that Jack, as a black South African, could have crossed and recrossed borders. But now he had an EU passport; one belonging to Jacques Moreau, a comparably pale-brown person; an Afro-French person of similar height, similar build. And Pedro, who owned a motorbike, would always have enough petrol. Over the next three months, as he brooded on his secret treasures, Jack made himself ready to become that other person. ‘
Je m’appelle Jacques
,’ he said. The utterance gave him much pleasure. It was, after all, what he had learned to say in Miss Lundy’s very first French class. It was an identity with which he was comfortable; a version of himself that he preferred. His preparations were meticulous. He worked even harder at French. He read Camus. He read Aimé Césaire. He worked his way through all Miss Lundy’s audio tapes from French radio. He watched French films. Then one day he made a trip into town and consulted with an optician. He had the poet’s glasses in his bag. The glasses were needed for a play, he said. He wanted plain glass in the frames.

It was just at this time that Josh wrote suggesting that Jack might like to apply for a student visa for the UK; that, with Josh’s guidance and recommendation, he could submit the relevant application and put in for sources of funding. Naturally, this might involve making a journey with no return, but Jack might nonetheless like to consider it. Jack didn’t reply. France would have been another matter, but for the moment he had no interest in the Anglo-Saxon world. His focus was elsewhere. He was about to embark on another sort of journey with no possibility of return. He had read what he could about Chad and Mauritania and about the Côte d’Ivoire. He had read about Mali and Burkina Faso. Mostly he had read about Dakar. He could draw street plans of that city, from the avenue Pasteur to the Route de N’Gor; from the Stade Léopold Sédar Sénghor to the Pointe des Almadies. Though the poet’s air tickets were in his possession, he daydreamed, occasionally and just for fun, in a
Boy’s Own
sort of way, about taking the Bamako–Dakar railroad into the city all the way from Mali, or about making the journey by river in a dugout canoe. He knew all about the Île de Gorée and the art studios off the avenue Pompidou.

Jack waited until the Christmas holidays, when he announced to his host family that he was off to spend a day in the library. Then he headed out on a tourist bus for the Lebombo Mountains that made the border with Mozambique; a young French traveller in tortoiseshell glasses, who travelled on an EU passport. At the border crossing he heard, with a small shiver of excitement, that people were speaking Portuguese; that strange sound, a bit like Spanish crossed with Russian. And Pedro was there to ease his transit. Jack rode pillion the short distance to the white beaches of Maputo, where, flashing down avenues of flame trees, they paused to eat giant prawns in the beautiful, crumbling shell of an old colonial hotel.

Jack and his courier encountered little trouble as they hugged the coast, heading north. It was early days yet in the dirty-tricks war and they travelled almost unimpeded. They stopped at a series of enchanting small towns, each one edged with a sparkling turquoise sea. They proceeded, via pretty archipelagos, where they paused among reed houses and time-warped pastel villas for plates of peanut-and-cassava stew and bowls of boiled crabs. They made river crossings and skirted the national parks. They came upon a Makonde mask dance on the Ilha de Moçambique. And then they arrived at the Rovuma River, where Pedro came to a stop. Jack made the crossing without him, in – yes – a dugout canoe. And then he was on the Tanzanian border, where his visa was perfectly in order.

‘Welcome to our country,’ said the border guards, who spoke both English and Swahili. A bus took him into Dar es Salaam, where for three days Jack slept on the beach, living off bread and root-vegetable crisps that small boys sold him in paper cones made from used school jotters. The same small boys sold him cups of Arab coffee, brewed up on little camping burners. There was no way, even if he’d wanted to, that he could have visited Bernie and Ida Silver. He would have given himself away and, besides, he adored his isolation.