Ivory (6 page)

‘It's nice to hear your voice. Why the early call?'

‘Bit of the same, really. I don't want to seem like a stalker, but I wanted to hear your voice too.'

She laughed. He smiled.

‘Are you alone right now?' he asked.

‘Yes, I'm in my cabin. The captain told me this was going to be very important, private business.'

‘It is. What are you wearing?'

‘George! You scoundrel.'

 

Heinrich sprayed vodka from his mouth and held a lighter to it, sending a shower of fire over the gyrating bodies dancing on the sand.
Girls squealed. Novak roared above the wail of the rock music: ‘Here's to us!'

Glasses, bottles, and cans were raised. Alex felt rum wash down over his wrist. ‘And those like us!'

‘Damn few of 'em.' Mitch concluded the toast. ‘Man, that job was a fucking buzz,' he yelled in Alex's ear.

Sarah was beside him and as Alex asked Mitch to repeat himself – they were standing next to the speakers – she slipped a hand into the pocket of his shorts and felt for him. Alex tried to concentrate on Mitch's words, but his head was fuzzy. Rum did that to him.

‘I said it was a fucking buzz. The car carrier. Major league now, huh? No more coastal rust buckets. How about a goddamned cruise ship next time?'

Alex shook his head. ‘It's not an everyday thing, Mitch. It takes planning – you know that. I wouldn't take on a liner in any case. Too much risk of innocent people getting hurt.'

‘Oh man, don't be such a fag.'

Alex laughed off the insult. Mitch was drunk – even more so than he – and Sarah's hand had found just the right spot. ‘Let's dance some more,' he said to her.

‘Don't tell me Mitch is right?'

He pinched her bum then held her close as they swayed, barefoot in the sand, to the rhythm. Flaming torches bathed them in flickering orange as they danced. Alex caught a glimpse of Danielle in the shadows and felt bad for a moment. Fuck it, he said to himself as Sarah's mouth found his. He laid a hand on her arse and she ground against him, harder, and hooked a smooth, shapely leg around him.

It was after two in the morning, but the music still thundered down the beach and the pirates and their women kept dancing and drinking.

Lisa, Novak's wife, had even flown to Vilanculos from Johannesburg and they'd picked her up by boat from the mainland that afternoon. His two children didn't know what their father really did for a living – as far as they knew he was a diving instructor, though in truth the ex-soldier's business had gone belly-up months before.

Heinrich's Mozambican girlfriend dispensed tequila slammers from a tray while her children and half-a-dozen others from the village chased each other between the dancers and drinkers. Henri, the former Foreign Legionnaire, danced with his half-Mozambican half-Portuguese boyfriend.

‘Take me to bed,' Sarah said in his ear.

‘Why, are you tired?'

‘No.'

Danielle pushed her way between Kevin, who was dancing with one of the three coffee-coloured prostitutes Mitch had brought over from the mainland that afternoon, and Mark and Lisa Novak. ‘If you're not too busy, I need to talk to you.'

Alex looked at Sarah, who shrugged and said, ‘No worries. I need to find a palm tree. He's all yours, Danni – for now at least.'

Danielle frowned and led Alex by the arm to the beach bar. While the hotel's bar and restaurant were being renovated – one of the many jobs that had fallen behind schedule – the ramshackle thatch and driftwood structure was the centrepiece of social life on the island. A huge stuffed marlin, a moth-eaten relic from the seventies, had pride of place amongst the bric-a-brac which included a rusted German helmet Novak had salvaged from the wreck of a U-boat, a silver-plated AK-47 Mitch had looted from one of Saddam Hussein's palaces, Henri's Foreign Legion kepi cap, and the Taliban flag Alex had captured in Afghanistan the day he lost his fingers.

The music was a few decibels less deafening by the bar. Alex ordered another rum and Coke from Jose, and a gin and tonic for Danielle.

‘No thanks, Jose,' she countermanded him. ‘I'm leaving, Alex.'

He nodded.

‘Aren't you going to say anything?'

Mitch bumped into him as he leaned over the bar and grabbed two frosted bottles of Laurentina beer. Alex elbowed him back into the crowd. ‘You said a couple of weeks ago you were thinking about it. About the time you said you wanted us to take a break, remember?'

‘You don't care that I'm going, do you, Alex?'

He shrugged. ‘They were your rules, Danni. You were the one who said you wanted to live a little, to be wild and free. No more chartered accountant from boring Belfast. Don't tell me you're actually just a good Catholic girl after all? If so, you might need to say a few dozen Hail Marys after taking part in our grandest theft, auto.'

‘Don't mock me, Alex.'

He held up two hands, palms out, the first and second fingers missing from his left hand.

‘Wipe that bloody smile off your face, Alex. Sure, I'm trying to be serious here for five minutes. I need to get on with my life. I need to grow up, and I'd like you to be there with me when I do.'

He ran a hand through his thick black hair and looked out at the dark waters and the long strip of reflected moonlight. Then he turned and stared across the beach, to the looming white concrete shell of what had once been the finest resort hotel in Portuguese Mozambique.

‘That bloody monstrosity.' Danni had a way of reading his mind.

‘It's all I've got, Danni. It's my life, my future.' He walked barefoot across the sand to the pile of timber that sat in front of the half-finished foyer. He stared up at the building in which he'd been born.

She shook her head and walked after him. ‘This is your problem. This gutted pile of concrete means more to you than any woman, any human being could.'

He shrugged. His mother and father had owned this hotel. It was a part of his family, his childhood and, yes, he would rather lose a beautiful woman than give it up again. ‘You're probably right. Though you could stay here and change my mind.'

She laughed without mirth. ‘I might, if I thought that was true, or possible. It's not just the hotel, though, Alex. It's this Peter Pan life you lead. You'll never give it up.'

‘Peter Pan? He wore green tights. No, I'm more Captain Hook.' He held up his left hand.

‘Very funny. I don't think you'll ever stop, though.'

‘What?' He was drunk, but he also knew what she meant.

‘The theft. The piracy. You're addicted to the danger, Alex. You're
fooling yourself – and all those mad bastards who follow you – that you're stealing to get enough money to open this five-star wet dream of yours. Thieving's not a means to an end for you any more. It's become the main game.'

‘That's not true.'

She waved his words away, as though swatting a mosquito. ‘The car carrier was crazy, Alex. I wish I hadn't gone along with it.'

‘Does that mean you want to give me back your ten grand?'

She smiled, then resurrected her grim look. ‘You're asking for trouble. You read the emails, the piracy report. You've put us on the international hot-spot map. You'll have the bloody South African Navy up here if you're not careful.'

‘Oooh, now I'm worried,' he said, waggling his remaining fingers.

‘Well, you should be. I'm going back to Ireland.'

‘You're serious, then.'

‘Of course I'm bloody serious. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, man, you're so damn infuriating, I –'

Alex moved closer and placed a hand behind her neck, drawing her face to his. ‘If you want to leave, no one's stopping you, but don't leave mad, Danni.' He kissed her and she, though initially close-lipped, opened her mouth to him.

She broke the kiss, finally, and laid her head on his shoulder. ‘I've got to move on. I can't be a bloody pirate wench for the rest of my life, Alex.'

He sensed movement close behind him. If it was Mitch, he'd belt him. Instead, he felt Sarah's arms encircle him and Danielle. ‘How about for another couple of hours then?' she whispered in Danielle's ear.

 

Alex waded into the warm still waters of the Indian Ocean. He smelled of booze, cigar smoke and women. It was almost a shame to lose the heady after-party aroma, but he needed to clear his head, so he dived and swam underwater for twenty metres.

He broke the surface and breathed a deep lungful of sweet African
air. A rocky reef ran in a straight line parallel to the beachfront, about thirty metres offshore. With a few liberal dashes of concrete added by his father in the late sixties, a seaside swimming pool had been created. Further down the beach a perfect metre-high wave curled and broke on the sand.

He turned and floated on his back. Looking up at the hotel he recalled Danni's words. What if she really was right?

Alex's knowledge of his parents' lives was drawn from memories and whispered asides at family gatherings. What he did know was that while his father had come from good stock, his military career had not been unblemished. Back in England, Donald Tremain had been a captain in the Blues and Royals, the second son of a landed but cashless baronet. There'd been a whiff of scandal in the regiment – something about his father and another officer's wife, and the mess accounts – and Donald had resigned his commission and gone abroad, eventually landing in Portugal. With neither title nor debts to his name, he'd indulged his one true passion – other than women – and become a wine merchant working for one of Oporto's port houses, exporting the fortified wine to the United Kingdom. Soon he met and fell in love with a young ballet dancer, Estella Almeida Silva. Estella's parents were farmers in Portuguese East Africa – Mozambique – and they paid for the couple's air tickets to the colony's capital, Lourenco Marques, where the wedding could be held before Estella started to show.

‘Your mother could have been a star, but she wanted to come back to Africa, and bullfights were more popular in Mozambique than the ballet,' his father always used to tell him. ‘But on or off the stage, Alex, your mother was the most beautiful woman I ever laid eyes on.'

Donald had presumed they would return to Portugal, or perhaps Britain, to start their new life, but Estella's father had a surprise in store for them. Uncertain about the long-term future of farming sugar in Africa, he had invested in a new hotel being constructed on a tiny island, Ilha dos Sonhos – the Island of Dreams – in the Bazaruto Archipelago. Tourism was booming, with Mozambique a sought-after destination for Portuguese, other Europeans and whites from
neighbouring South Africa and Rhodesia. Despite their complete lack of experience, Donald and Estella had jumped at her father's offer for them to manage the luxurious new hotel.

Alex's father liked to tell the story about how, just a few months later, his only child had come into the world.

‘Dear God, I was nervous. I wanted your mother to go to the mainland, but she would say to me, “Look, Donald, the women on the island have their children in their homes. It's the most natural thing in the world.” Natural, pah!'

Estella immersed herself in the running of the hotel and was overseeing the catering for a colonial society wedding of a hundred guests a week after her due date.

‘The high society of Mozambique was there – even the governor. Your mother was waddling about the bloody place greeting guests with a beaming smile in public and swearing like a trooper at the staff in Portuguese behind the scenes. They loved her, you know, but there was never any doubt who was running the show.'

Alex still smiled when he remembered the horrified look his father always put on when he recounted walking into the kitchen, following a breathless message from an African waiter as the wedding feast's main course was being served.

‘She was on the bloody serving counter, bare to the world, a waitress holding on to each hand and the chef having a coronary trying to get the meals out while you, my boy, were served up to the world.'

Alex's father told him, before he died, of the tough times and ridiculously long hours he and Alex's mother had endured to keep the hotel running and profitable. Alex, however, remembered only the good times, until it all ended.

He narrowed his eyes, and in the slanting, golden afternoon light he could mentally edit out the scorch marks, and bullet holes, the broken windows and the weeds of the overgrown garden. Instead, he saw his father in a white dinner jacket and black bow tie; his mother in a fashionably short evening gown, high heels and pearls, tying an African maid's apron in a proper bow. Waiters in starched shirts and
white gloves circulated amidst a crowd of holiday-makers who seemed to speak every language on earth. They bore silver platters piled with glasses of champagne and freshly cooked lobsters. Music played in the disco downstairs, while he and the children of the hotel's staff chased each other around the palm trees that lined the white sandy beaches.

It was a wonderful time, but it had been too good to last. There had been armed rebellion in Mozambique since the 1960s and, although life had changed little on the island, Alex and his family could not escape the inevitability of history. A bloodless coup toppled the government in faraway Lisbon in 1974 and by June 1975 Mozambicans were running their own country. Their former colonial masters were no longer welcome.

He recalled his father's mood changing from dogged optimism to barely checked rage overnight.

‘No you can't take your bloody toys, Alex!' He'd recoiled from his father's barked orders to pack one bag, and one only. He'd hidden behind his mother's skirt, but when he looked up at her he saw she was crying.

Alex's black friend, Jose, was on the jetty as their boat pulled away from the island. Jose looked confused, but waved. Some of the hotel workers, whom Alex had only ever thought of as friends, were jeering and laughing.