Loving Monsters (21 page)

Did they really, Jayjay? I wonder what Captain W. E. Johns would have to say about that. Do you think your boyhood hero would have approved of this writer’s eye of yours?

I find myself torn between exasperation and a need to record these details in a scientific spirit. As well be accurate about juvenile sperm as about bees, I suppose. Still, this particular snippet, even though culled from the rarefied world of a pre-war orgy, can hardly be arcane knowledge given that half the world’s population has either passed, or will be passing, through boyhood. So what is all this selective blurt? He must know I can’t be shocked. I want to pick him up, I
will
pick him up, on that word ‘alone’.

‘Alone and trying to catch up’, you said.

– Did I? –

Yes. What did you mean by ‘trying to catch up’? With what? With whom?

– Oh. You know … Something like making up for lost time? That’s it. Eltham again, naturally. I felt I’d fallen behind. I was in pursuit of the
unwrapped.
Anyway, the only point of my telling you all this scurrilous stuff is merely to illustrate how at that time I kept my various pursuits quite separate. That must surely be an impostor’s gift, to live on several tacks at once, each of them interesting to me. But I was also open to anything else that might come along, and what came along was the Second World War. Before that happened, though, I went to Alexandria. And
that
is the beginning of the roundabout answer to the question of how it is I come to be living here at ‘Il Ghibli’. –

But I still can’t guess the weight of ‘alone’. He’s concealing something here. Yet if he can be frank about paederastic orgies it’s indeed hard to imagine what he might jib at revealing.

*

Suddenly such matters (as well as Jayjay and his entire story) will have to wait for a while. A phone call arrives from a distant capital, from another precinct of my life. Although I answer it on a bright Tuscan afternoon it comes from the dead of night. ‘The General has agreed to see you, but his son is trying to dissuade him. Now is the time to jump in, James.’

So jump I must, thousands of miles, on the off chance that a retired multi-millionaire will keep his word. Just before my friend hangs up I distinctly hear a dog bark in the background eight thousand miles away and at once that landscape rushes in at me from over the planet’s curve. Jayjay and his Egypt drop from sight and in their place I see Southeast Asia. I am in a familiar book-lined room with windows opened on the tropic night beyond the mosquito screens, the dogs loping in the compound beyond, the whirling haloes of insects around the security lamps. On my last visit I probably passed a remark to the very hound I have just overheard. Why should the chance barking of a dog be more potent than the voice of a friend in summoning a distant land into being? Suddenly the place is here again like a phantom limb that aches with the memory of its former life, insistent in its solidity. From nowhere comes the thought of how James Ellroy summarised the philosophy of the Kennedy era: Look Good, Kick Ass, Get Laid. I reflect how equally well that could apply to the despised and defunct regime of the country to which I have been recalled. Kennedy, though, is revered, his own nation being major-league ass-kickers with the power to do a Kremlin job on history. My damned beloved useless country whose dogs can be heard down phone lines eight thousand miles away lacks the power to whitewash history. On the other hand it will remain forever forgiven. I have to think my life is strange.

‘The General has agreed to see you’, but the dog is the clincher. Later, I throw things into a bag then fail to sleep. After all, Jayjay pretty much fell on me like an overripe mango, whereas I have been hoping and scheming for the last three years to get this ex-general, ex-minister, to talk. Yes, jump.

*

The next day Jayjay affects not to be put out in any way when I explain the urgency of my departure. He essays graciousness, fails. ‘It’ll all be the same in a hundred years,’ he says lugubriously.

Sunset. A familiar strand of coral chips. The sun has just sunk between clouds like torn-off wings, down through parakeet colours into blood. A few fishing boats drawn up beyond the high tide mark. One or two being painted or overhauled are rolled up on palm boles, leaning on an outrigger, keel clear of the ground. Their interiors are heaped with crisped fronds to protect them from the daytime glare. Others, readied for a night’s fishing, are being carried down to where the flaccid water barely lolls against the shore. Several are already out in the bay, low dark splinters with an oar rising and dipping against the crimson lightfall, each bow tipped with the spark of an oil lamp.

A great advantage in being a jobbing writer is the variety offered by having more than one job on hand. This evening Italy, Jayjay and his ongoing Egyptian saga occupy a space unrelated to distance, far away on the yonder side of tonight’s chromatic horizon. The planet rolling over in its sleep will soon disclose this same cinnabar doorstep behind which a new day is even now preparing to yawn open on Tuscan hills and light up a small row
of beehives overlooking a broad valley. My bees: checked and given a reluctant farewell dusting of oxytetracycline powder mixed with icing sugar against Foul Brood. They are already in another universe. Jayjay is elsewhere still, frozen on the brink of the Second World War where his narrative has been abruptly snapped off to enable me to fly away and talk to the carefully assembled monsters and heroes of a more modern age. This is contract work; Jayjay’s is still a gentleman’s agreement. So I have abandoned him in 1938 and returned to the world’s other side, to the little village I know best where I greet old friends and acclimatise myself before going to the capital to begin fact-gathering.

And there was my hut in the forest beneath the mango tree, its grass thatch lank, its crafty shoulders hunched. Amazing that it should still have been standing; that the rusted hinges should have creaked and the split-bamboo door opened on an earth floor sadly unswept and marked with the tracks of land crabs. On the sagging basketwork walls I found still pinned, limp with damp: (1) last year’s calendar, given away by a Chinese dry-goods store in town; (2) a crayon-coloured invitation to speak at the Elementary School’s Christmas party and help judge the competitions; (3) another invitation, this one to a godchild’s high-school graduation ceremony; (4) a mildewed matchbox (empty) on a string; (5) the blade of a knife I broke when trying to repair the trigger of a speargun shortly before leaving the last time. How odd it was that in a climate of typhoon and termite and rot this mouldy, wormy structure should still have been here with its freight of habitation and memories! How odd it was that I, too, was here after six months’ absence, still alive and suddenly having to think where to hang things, pausing to remember which key fitted the padlocked inner room. Evidence of too many strands to a life, perhaps; the way it takes a day or two for the right words to come back, for the right ordering of time, for old patterns of living to resurface and take charge. Strange how one body can house so many lives at once, including a European self and a tropical self, each appearing so different while really being no
more than apartments in the same block. Or maybe wings of the same palace, since it feels an expansive, palatial sort of life, with bunk-holes in cultures and continents.

The single inner room was the hut’s central box, raised a metre above ground on four legs. The rest was walled-in lean-to. I climbed the wood steps and let myself into the interior of a grandiose lobster pot with spicules of daylight sifting through the walls and down from gaps in the thatch. Coco-lumber framework, bamboo slat floor through which at night one could watch the big hermit crabs crawling about and listen to the hollow knock of their borrowed shells. On a shelf heaped with worm dust was a plastic bag with half-forgotten clothes inside: mouldy T-shirts, shorts. Nothing else needed. Bat shit, gecko shit and fragments of thatch covered the floor. Pyramids of pink, ginger or saffron dust dotted every horizontal surface, depending on the kind of timber being eaten away. Even while I was absent for half a year and the house stood empty it was being gnawed busily from within. As I stood there in the hot gloom, sweating in long trousers, a gecko in the thatch began its quacking call and I knew I was home, just as in Italy I know I’m back when I can smell the bees before I can even see their hives, and in London the characteristic clatter of a black cab idling places me at a familiar point on the earth’s surface.

So on to the beach this first evening, seated around a driftwood fire with friends. Some I knew when they were small children, and several of them now have small children of their own. So it goes on, on this beach, which itself is nothing but the cycle of life made for sitting on with friends: fish bones, chicken bones, cuttlebones, goat horn, mixed into fathomless tons of coral chips. And probably, if one knew it, quite a few human bones too; for fishermen regularly disappear out there in the strait and in time parts of them must find their way home by stealth as skeletal fragments unnoticed among the charnel multitude. This sense of sitting on the heaped-up past (which is equally the heaped-up future) is greatly consoling. It gives significance to our gestures, to every component of this well-loved scene. Larbo and Iyan are, as usual,
in charge of the cooking. They have improvised a hearth of coral chunks and raked out a corner of the fire on to it. Fish spitted on green palm ribs are already curling and emitting gasps of steam. The glowing coals light up faces and the insides of forearms as one by one the fish are scrutinised and turned. A large pot of rice has already been brought from a nearby house. Children chase about in the background, their hard little feet sending up clatters of coral. More people emerge from the darkness with broad smiles, bearing bottles. They join the group. ‘Welcome back,’ shyly. ‘You were away too long, James.’ ‘Have you heard about Bado? He was electrocuted. What will happen to his two little children and his poor wife?’ ‘There was trouble here during the election, did you know?’ ‘You remember Larry’s dog, Boyong? It was a great shame. He went with Larry when he went to see the Governor and you know how frisky he used to be? The Governor’s bodyguards thought Boyong was attacking their man so they just shot him. Right there on the spot. Larry couldn’t believe it. A pity. Boyong was a good dog. No compensation from the Governor, of course.’

Overhead are the shifted constellations, several of which cannot be seen from Italy. And behind everything, invisible beyond the circle of firelight but breathing through our very marrow, is the sea. One needs to walk down to the shore to view clearly that starlit sheet, pooling and seething its blacks and silvers to the middle distance and lit at its furthest edge by silent electric flashes. These lightnings outline cloudbanks like pink and pearl mountain ranges. At one’s feet the rising beach trips up the small waves so they constantly topple and fall on their faces, drawing back to try once more, over and over again, endlessly driven but always caught by the same simple trick of physics. One more of the helpless cycles which we share (thinks the traveller, having himself just returned) as the roast fish turn, the stars heel silently overhead, the faces around the fire show new lines and the newly dead are solemnly toasted. And this is the consolation of being welcomed on a distant shore and pulled into a fire’s circle by
yesteryear’s balding children: that I should wish one day for my own bones to be trundled here in the tireless surf, to be raced on by the unborn, to be gossiped over by people saying nothing different from what is said tonight. The same banalities, the same ancient jokes.

Because my godchildren approach shyly from the darkness or squat beside me with the firelight lively in their eyes, because this cycle of greeting and catching-up is such a regular event, and because the sea’s steady pulse underwrites these contracts of affection, my own daughter Emma now feels greatly distant to me, like a dream child whose physical existence is in doubt. I once derived conventional comfort from thinking that through her I might at least pass on some genetic inheritance, that a coded drop of me could diffuse into the great leaky river as it meanders aimlessly onward. But then at a certain age one is overtaken by a resigned modesty that becomes impatient with notions of personal survival, above all with the idea of a self that could be perpetuated by the random couplings of one’s descendants. In fact, if we were looking for tokens of individual survival we would do better to open a handful of the very beach on which we are sitting. It is precisely the relic of an individual that is digging so painfully into our left buttock: one that can be groped for, removed, and identified by firelight as a large Textile Cone, a seashell faded and abraded but nevertheless the self-built house of a creature that once on nights like this went grazing across the seabed with its eyes on stalks.

The glasses of drink circulate, the women leave carrying plates and pots to be washed up, the children straggle off to hut floors spread with sleeping mats. We are left, the men, the elders, the bottle philosophers, feeding the fire and swapping stories while idly watching the lights of fishing boats out in the strait. From that far darkness drifts the intermittent putter of small engines as the boats move from one favoured ground to another. Nearby, a scrunching and coughing marks where a dog has found the discarded spine of a grouper. ‘We don’t want to talk politics, James,
but we think you ought to know …’ ‘As you know, I’m not a gossip, James, but had you heard …?’ The village captain was suspended from his duties a month ago for trying to cheat a neighbour out of some land and then attempting to induce a crony in the local Land Registry Office to falsify documents.

And so to bed, walking back up the forest track with the usual half-hearted torch, the stream gurgling off to the right and the fruit bats flapping in the crowns of coconut palms. The mechanical chorus of frogs in the paddies, the overlapping sounds of geckos, the night creatures’ hoots and screams: these annihilate time for me, carrying on exactly where I left them last. And lying on my back on the floor of the hut, gazing up to where a late rising moon cuts slits in the thatch with a silver blade, I think that nothing has changed since I was last here. I am not a day older. I shall mourn the electrocuted Bado (whom I knew since he was twelve) and even the shot dog Boyong, who had a sense of humour greater than that of the Governor’s goons. Yet these latest deaths are also part of the cycle, and the level at which I grieve for them is itself an offshoot that in time will wither. The scandals are the same. Maybe the only new thing in the interim has been Jayjay. His life story so far has made me consider to what extent his experiences are at all consonant with my own. When I first came to this village by the sea I was exactly twice the age he was when he first arrived in Suez. Yet the last twenty years have given me a pungency of experience I associate with having been much younger than I actually was. It was like a second beginning. Unlike Jayjay I know that important and interesting things have happened to me after the age of thirty, though they include dreaming. Perhaps because of the unchanging nature of life here the feeling still persists of this place being able to stop time, something it shares with my hillside fastness in Italy.

And thus I tilt towards sleep on the floor of the hut, mulling over the routine I will pick up again tomorrow. By night I shall go fishing with comrades and by day discreetly plot to have the day-care centre re-roofed without putting the village elders’
backs up. This will not be easy since by hallowed tradition all funding for such projects passes through their hands, on the way undergoing severe erosion. After the drinking and cockfighting and paying-off of old grocery debts there would normally be enough left to thatch half the roof. Subtlety is needed and ingenious double binds thought up in order to shame the elders into aiding their own community rather than helping themselves out of precedent responsibility to their own families. What, then, will be the effect of this latest piece of news about the captain’s suspension …? (The tilt becomes a headlong slide into unconsciousness.)

*

A week later I am in the capital, having forsaken the roots and tubers of the provinces for urban living. My ex-General, who had turned out to be in Hong Kong on business when I arrived, finally agrees to a preliminary meeting in a few days’ time. In the interim I seek interviews with family members and minions of the ex-dictator, with various demi-saints of the resistance, with racked priests and student leaders who now carry briefcases in place of banners, with men who bring their bodyguards into the room while carrying guns of their own. Having acclimatised myself to the provinces I must now do the same for the city. In place of forest tracks are the hot and roaring concrete caverns of Asia. Through them I move between appointments in sumptuous apartments, palatial private villas, vile private palaces.

At last the evening with the ex-General arrives, my reason for having flown half around the world. He has a suite in one of those residential condominiums lined from ground floor to penthouse in rare hardwoods. Their entrance halls are scarcely to be distinguished from the foyers of exclusive hotels. Behind marble desks and sprays of flowers sit handsome girls and impeccably suited men with soft manners and stone eyes. You cannot even approach a lift without first having been identified and invited to ascend by your unseen host far overhead. Even then another lithe, respectful killer accompanies you in the lift and steps out with you into an
airlock, an antechamber containing a plush-and-gilt sofa that has never been sat on, a sage green carpet and an antique ormolu mirror set with one-way glass from behind which you and your escort are scanned by cameras. Eventually one half of the great double doors (taken from a twelfth-century baptistry in Provence, you will shortly learn) opens and a beaming minder bows you in while running his eyes over your jacket for wrong bulges. Behind you the bulletproof lift doors close with the noise of a safe swinging shut. And there, rising politely to his feet with a little cry of welcome from a deep chair beside a blazing fire of gas logs, is that famous face, the wily survivor, the ex-President’s right-hand man, the very one whom the racked priests swore before God had taken personal charge of their racking at an interrogation centre back during the Emergency. It is a good face, much better than the press photographs suggest: Asian-patrician but without the obsidian glance. Thick greying hair kept short (the military legacy), beautifully cut Italian suit, the graceful way in which he takes your sweaty paw in his cool dry hand.