FEARLESS FINN'S MURDEROUS ADVENTURE (24 page)

The talk in the sixth form dorm that night was about what we’d all seen in the art room…and what some imagined they’d seen.
Did you ever see so much pussy hair
?
I’ll never shave mine again
.
Did you see the look she gave me when I asked her to lift her arm and show me more of her nipples
?

All the other girls volunteered to pose during the next art lesson. We’d seen each other in the showers, so there were no girly giggles, but I still didn’t volunteer. Anyway, I enjoyed capturing the short poses with rapid strokes of my charcoal.

When class ended Marie-Thérèse told me to remain in the room. After the other girls had packed up their sketches and left she stared directly at me, reached out and cupped my left tit in her hand.

“Susie, Susie, you must sit for me,” she said briskly. Then she lifted up both my tits. “These…these are magnificent! Perfect for breast-feeding,
ne sont-ils pas pour
? Yes, ma chérie, you must pose for me at my
privé
studio in town.”

She also said something about Dutch masters and Flemish women breast-feeding, but I wasn’t taking in what she was saying. The thought of being naked with the woman of my nightly dreams was all I could think of.

“
Oui, oui
…yes, yes.
Tout temps
…any time,” I blurted out in my schoolgirl French.

Over that summer Marie-Thérèse led me into the world of lesbian love. She awoke such sexual passion in me, I felt alive for the first time in my life. Of course, I believed that I was in love and resigned to spending my life devoted to another female – a dyed-in-the-wool lesbian disciple of Lesbos and follower of Sister Benedetta Carlini.

My first visit to a music festival changed all that. Sex with Marie-Thérèse had been fabulous, but sex with Fran had been divine, extraordinary, out-of-this-world-super! When I returned to Cheltenham for the autumn term I was a woman – a sexually experienced woman who infinitely preferred a man making love to me.

Fran came to Cheltenham most weekends that term. Marie-Thérèse eventually accepted that our affair was at an end, but not before tricking me into a threesome with her and the assistant gym mistress. I’d be lying if I said that I hadn’t enjoyed myself…wedged between two beautiful passionate women. But I didn’t return for a repeat performance, and Marie-Thérèse found a new special student.

———

Apart from the Harley rider at the
Australiana
, Professor Shirley Jones is the only woman to turn me on since I left school. To thank her for offering me her home, her friendship, and her bed, I decided to treat Shirley to a weekend of luxury in Finn Flynn’s penthouse. We swam in the rooftop pool, drank Champagne, spent hours in the Jacuzzi…and didn’t wear a stitch of clothing for two days.

THE GAMBIA

I left Hong
Kong before breakfast, flew via Senegal to the Gambia, and arrived in Banjul before tea time. Gerry flew from Macau to England; his packaged holiday direct flight from Manchester landed in Banjul International Airport an hour before I did.

Hussein booked each of us a bungalow in the grounds of a newly opened American hotel about eight kilometres outside Banjul, on the seashore. Within the lush, green grounds of the hotel complex there’s a sweet smell from the array of exotic flowers growing alongside the paved pathways that wend around the place.

The enormous swimming pool is surrounded by straw-covered umbrellas that shelter guests from the scorching sun that appears to linger in the sky directly overhead. Smiling gardeners in light blue overalls silently tend the gardens with hoes and rakes, and sweep the paths with witches’ brooms. The
swish
,
swish
sound of the brooms creates a background to the chirps of the tropical birds and the high-pitched clicking of the male cicadas.

After I changed my clothes I went looking for Gerry. I found him in the bar…looking uncomfortable and ridiculous. He’s surrounded by eight fat, middle-aged women talking loudly in Lancashire accents, and batting their false eyelashes at passing African waiters. Gerry looks like an actor from a 1920s’ Hollywood movie in his silly jungle print shirt and tropical length shorts. I left him to his lardy ladies and ambled out to the beach.

Walking towards a lean-to grass hut on the beach, I hear voices speaking in Swedish, and I can make out the sound of ice cubes clinking against glass. It’s a primitive bar, with three high stools, a white-shirted barman, and two blonde women drinking from tall cocktail glasses.

I introduced myself to the blondes in basic Swedish, and offered to get them refills. They accepted the drinks and told me they’d arrived two days earlier on an ‘environmental exploration and conservation safari’. They’re going to the Tambi wetlands in the morning in search of butterflies. Recollecting the small studio apartment I stayed in with Anna when the owner was away looking at butterflies in Africa, I asked them if they’re school teachers.

“Why do you ask such a question?”

“Do we look like school teachers?”

I’d forgot how direct Swedish women are. I decided to deflect the conversation away from my apparently insulting question with my rudimentary Swedish. “
Ingen jag någonsin träffat
,” I replied, as diplomatically as I could.

“
Mycket bra
,
talar du lite svenska….Ja
?
Bra
.
Men din accent inte engelska tror jag
?” said the first woman.

“
Nej
,
irländska
.
Jag är en irländare
,
men vi bör tala engelska
,
min svenska är fattiga
,” I said.

They bought me an orange juice and we talked in English about conservation and the African wetlands. Then I was informed of their shared opinion of the ‘hideous British women’ who come to the Gambia in search of sex. They think it’s disgusting that these ‘fat, ugly women’ pay young African men to pleasure them.

I didn’t comment on the sex tourists from Britain, but neither did I tell them about the middle-aged Swedish women I’d met as a teenager in Las Palmas. These women tore hundred kronor notes in half, left one half under their coffee cup and took the other half to their rooms. If you picked up a half note and followed a woman to her room you could leave with the other half of the hundred – but only after you’d satisfied her sexual fantasies. The barman at the café we hung around had a roll of adhesive tape ready to stick the notes back together. Those Swedish mammas wintering in the Canary Isles guaranteed that I had money to see me through to the summer. It was no hardship to shag a svelte Swede, unlike the situation for the African lads trying to shag fat Lancashire women…I imagine.

The enormous African sun is falling in the sky, turning day to night in the blink of an eye. I bid good evening to the
svenska flicka
and made my way back to my bungalow. After a cool shower I dried off under the ceiling fan and put on fresh clothes.

Around eight o’clock Hussein sent a street boy into the hotel to tell a porter to tell us that he’s waiting outside. As Gerry and I stepped out of the hotel we were surrounded by women, children and hostile lads begging for money. Or rather, demanding money.

“You give us dollars now…yes. We have no money, you are rich white tourists.”

“Give us your change…give it now.”

“I like that shirt….Give it to me….Please mister, please mister.”

“No food, no school. Give me money for food mister, money for school.”

“You American, plenty dollars, give us dollars, we let you go. Good?”

I saw Hussein sitting in his Range Rover across the road, and I pushed my way through the throng of beggars. But when I looked back towards the hotel entrance I saw Gerry under siege from three of the biggest lads. They’ve surrounded him and they’re jabbing their fingers in his face and pulling at his flowery shirt.

Feck this for a game of soldiers
, I said as I crossed back over the road. I kidney punched the lad nearest me and he sank to the ground without a murmur. A swift, hard kick just below the second lad’s kneecap took care of him. And the third fellah got a very unfriendly kick to the groin. Grabbing Gerry’s arm, I pulled him across the road.

The lads lost interest and backed off, yelling threats to cut off my prick and boil my balls. At least that’s what Hussein told me they were yelling as they hobbled off down an alleyway. Anyway, Gerry and I climbed into the Range Rover and we took off in a cloud of red dust.

Hussein brought us to a small café run by a Lebanese friend of his from school. We discussed our business arrangements over a meal of kibbeh and Lebanese flat bread.

“So, Hussein, after you get the cheques, what guarantees do we have that you’ll make sure the timber gets on the ship and is sent to Japan?” Gerry asked.

“Gerry my friend, it is no problem, no problem. I am a Muslim, a man of honour. My word is my bond. My word is good enough for my European business associates in Holland. Do they not send me expensive vehicles many months before receiving their African bush marijuana?”

“What do you think Finn? Can we trust this guy with a hundred thousand dollars?” Gerry asked.

“Gerry, there’s no need to take his word for it. My friend here knows that if he tries to rip us off I’ll forget my manners and blow his feckin’ head off. Now, isn’t that right my little Lebanese rascal?” I said.

“Yes, my Irish friend,” said Hussein, with a sheepish grin.

Hussein excused himself from the table and went out to his Range Rover. He returned with six neatly planed pieces of wood, each with a sticker identifying its species.

We finished off our pot of strong Turkish coffee, and I asked the café owner to call a taxi to take me and Gerry back to the hotel. “Meet us at Box Bar Road and Marina Parade tomorrow morning at nine,” I told Hussein before we left.

Sitting in the back of the taxi, watching me feeling the wood samples, Gerry seems more than a bit uneasy.

“Surely you were kidding about blowing the guy’s head off Finn? It’s not like we’re at home here in darkest Africa. You were kidding. Right?” he asked, with more than a hint or two of panic in his voice.

I didn’t respond to Gerry’s question with as much as a grin. I stuck to explaining that I want to meet Hussein at the local woodworkers’ yards where they store timber. This is where we’ll be able to find out more about the samples, and to get an idea of the true buying prices.

———

I knocked on the door of Gerry’s bungalow at six thirty a.m. When I walked in I found him lying beside one of the Swedish women I’d met at the beach bar. He isn’t too eager to leave the bed, and he’s wondering about the early start since we aren’t due to meet Hussein for another two and a half hours.

I apologised to the
svensk flicka
and reminded her that she’s supposed to be looking for butterflies in the wetlands. She slid out of Gerry’s bed and gave me a long, slow look at her naked body. I got the message – see what you missed!

We skipped breakfast and sat into the back of the first taxi in the queue lined up in the driveway of the hotel. I spotted the African lads from last night in an alleyway across the road, but they turned their heads away, pretending not to see me. So much for chopping off my balls and boiling my prick, or whatever it was they threatened.

Before we turned right into Grant Street – off Independence Drive – I told Gerry why I wanted to make an early start. “If we visit the woodworkers’ yards before Hussein has a chance to spread around a few dollars…to guarantee we get the answers he wants us to get…we’ll end up far better off. Hussein can’t help himself…he has to look for an edge, a little extra on a deal. But I’m wise to that built-in tendency, and I frustrate him whenever I can.”

Sweet-smelling timber and the scent of bougainvillea fill the air in the first timber yard we walked into. There’s a pretty young girl with spindly legs and ebony skin in the yard; she’s taking a billycan of boiling water from a wood fire. We waited while she cautiously poured the boiling water into an oversized Queen Elizabeth II coronation mug. She added thick, yellowish condensed milk from a Nestlé tin and gave the mixture a stir. Then she handed the mug to a very old man and fled into the timber store.

The man’s once handsome face is now wrinkled and covered in sun spots and scars, and even the oversized mug is lost inside his gnarled hands. He took a sup from the mug, smiled a toothless grin, and beckoned the spindly legged little girl to join him.

I handed him the wood samples. He ran them through his fingers, held them up to the sun and smelt them; then he spoke to the girl in Manding.

“What do you want to know about the wood?” she whispered to us in English.

The old man gave us the answers we need, so I have an idea of what the wood is worth. I gave the little girl twenty dollars for her help, and in return I got a smile that only an innocent African child can reveal.

There doesn’t seem to be any point in visiting other timber yards. Anyway, the sun is blazing and the temperature is forty degrees Celsius in the shade – and there isn’t any shade.

I hailed a taxi and we drove to Box Bar Road and Marina Parade; we waited in the air-conditioned vehicle for Hussein. We passed the time watching the long-legged teenage girls on their way to Saint Augustine Senior Secondary School. Somehow, it doesn’t seem a voyeuristic thing to do. The girls are waving, passing incomprehensible comments, and laughing at us – a healthy response, I think.