The Diamond Lane (17 page)

“– I nearly was.”

“You were not,” said Mouse.

“See, she thinks I exaggerate.”

“You do exaggerate.”

“Don't let's have a lovers' quarrel now,” said Shirl.

“One of the poachers spotted me. He ripped the Nagra, the tape recorder, from my shoulder, bashed me in the face with the butt of his gun. I was in bad shape, bleeding, a broken nose, God knows what else. It so happened that in a neighboring village there was another crew, a West German crew, shooting a television documentary on the very same subject. The crew hauled me into the village with the intention of radioing the flying doctor, but there wasn't time. I had lost consciousness and a frightful amount of blood. The West Germans were heading out to shoot some second unit business when one of the women on the crew – your daughter – saw us. She'd had first-aid training, and with the help of a lunch box full of Band-Aids, one still isn't sure how she managed it, she patched me up.

“Even though one of my eyes was nearly swollen shut, I liked what I saw. She sat there with me for several hours – even though it meant holding up the West German crew – making sure the bleeding had stopped and I didn't develop a fever. It would have been to her advantage to leave me for the flying doctors. We were making a film on the same subject, Losing the sound recordist would have held up the BBC production indefinitely.”

“Isn't that nice. I always worry about my girls. They didn't have a father, you know. I worry about their moral fibers. This just goes to show.”

“The next day I was feeling much better, and could not get Mouse out of my head.”

“Here comes the sexy part,” said Mimi.

“I'm getting there –”

“– so there really is a sexy part? This can't be a story about my sister.” Mimi smiled at Tony from behind her glass of wine.

“I was angry with myself for not finding out her last name or where she lived, nothing. So I told Uncle Ni I needed to see her to see about getting some painkillers and he let me go. He was quite proud of my heroic feat. They'd recovered the Nagra and the tape, which showed up those bastards for what they were. It was quite good stuff. Anyway, the bit about the painkillers? An absolute lie. She'd given me more than I would ever need.

“When I arrived back at the village, I was told by a production assistant who had stayed behind that a skeleton crew – just Mouse, the director, and a soundman – were out filming some elephant herds. I was surprised she was shooting. I had imagined she was a production assistant or the fish ‘n' trinkets girl – the person who goes into a village ahead of the production crew and smooths the way, giving them fish or fabric or mirrors, whatever they want or need, so the crew can come in and do their work with no local interference. But Mouse was a cameraman! I worried if that wasn't dangerous – considering what I'd just been through – and the production assistant, whose name was Flora, a big ruddy Irish girl, said it was suicide. Flora was in awe of Mouse. She said she was fearless. No fear of heights, no claustrophobia, and absolutely no fear for her personal safety. Not only that, all her footage was always in focus.

“Finally, late that night, the crew arrived back at the village. Flora and I had been waiting in a local bar for hours. I'll never forget that place. The proprietor, afraid the wooden tables would be devoured by ants, had put pie tins full of gasoline under the table legs. Mouse came in and ordered a beer. She was quite knackered, and filthy, but still I could smell some of her perfume. Anyway, I was quite drunk, and could tell Mouse wondered what in the hell I was doing there. I made up a silly lie. I said that before we had left Nairobi we had forgotten to recharge the batteries for our camera, and did she have any she could spare?
She didn't believe me. The venerable BBC botching something so basic? But she gave me all the batteries she could, at the risk of needing them in the future. They had two more weeks out in the bush.”

“So it was love at first sight. On her part, too, I mean. I always worried that Mousie had a kind of cold streak.”

“That's nice, Mom,” said Mimi. “Calling Mouse frigid.”

“We're all family here. Can't I speak honestly in front of my own family? Tony should know these things.”

“Indeed –” Tony looked confused.

“See what you started?” Mouse stood and lurched out of the room. Behind her she heard Mimi say, “Just ignore her. She always overreacts.”

Mouse sat down on the diving board and lit a cigarette. While the rest of the house had been remodeled, the lagoon was exactly as Mouse remembered it. The colored lights were on; the waterfall burbled for the benefit of no one.

Even though it was teeth-chattering chilly out here, it was better than listening to Tony recast the story of their courtship into a Norse saga. The more gin and tonics he had, the more heroic the elements became. He was near death! She had the gift of healing and nursed him back to health! In point of fact, he had a broken nose which she plugged with gauze and a black eye whose swelling shrunk under an ordinary ice cube. She had not given him all the batteries she had (she was starry-eyed, but not that starry-eyed). She was not romantic, nor was she frigid. She lay down on the diving board and closed her eyes. The sliding glass door to the kitchen was open.

“Meanwhile, back in Nairobi,” Tony continued, “Uncle Ni's favorite cameraman had thrown out his back playing cricket. Uncle Ni was a good person to know. He had bags of connections in the London film community, and since I wasn't planning on staying in Africa forever anyway, I told him about Mouse. He'd actually heard of her before. She had a reputation for being able to take care of gear under the most horrendous conditions, also,
her size allowed her into small spaces where a man just wouldn't fit. I told him I would be talking to her soon. It gave me an excuse to call her and invite her for a drink. I told myself if it turned out she was involved with another man, or married, I would turn the evening into a business meeting.

“We met at an Indian restaurant for dinner and I was quite sort of
taken
with her. But when the meal came to an end I found myself – I still am not sure why I did this – telling her about Uncle Ni and the camera position with the BBC. The evening went thud. Much later I would find out that she was as interested in me as I was in her but then believed that I had only invited her out to recruit her for my uncle. She did not like staff jobs, preferring to freelance, but she took the job with Ni out of spite.

“At this point I should say that Uncle Ni is a good-looking chap. Sort of your typical outdoorsy colonialist, graying temples, nice tan. My father's little brother, then about forty-five. A man women liked.

“So Mouse goes to work for him, and I'm not rolling sound anymore. I've been promoted to associate producer and we're in pre-production on
Charles Rydall: Man of Kima
. Rydall was a little-known police superintendent of Nairobi round the turn of the century whose great claim to fame was being eaten by a lion while sitting in his compartment on a train making a stop at the tiny village of Kima. It was a dog of a project, but the BBC was doing some series on historical Nairobi and somehow this fit in.

“In any event, Nigel falls for Mouse. He hires her, then he falls for her. I don't know what's going on and I can't very well ask. Mouse is impossible to read. I think, I'm not sure what I'm thinking. Uncle Ni says he wants to marry her, so I ask her out for a drink, using the pretense of the production schedule. I say I'd like her input. No one ever asks for the camera operator's input, but she agrees to meet me.”

“So Mouse had two marriage proposals?” asked Shirl.

“I'm getting to that.”

“I can't believe she never wrote to tell us. Two marriage proposals.”

“She was probably totally wigged out. I had three guys who wanted to marry me once. It was really thrilling, but kinda nerve-racking.”

“What three boys wanted to marry you?” asked Shirl.

“It was a long time ago. I can't remember. One was that guy who came to get the possum that drowned in the pool. From the animal control place.”

“Anyway,” Tony continued, “we meet for a drink at The New Stanley Hotel. It's a touristy spot, but an easy spot. Mouse is early, and waits for me outside where she is witness to something quite strange. There are quite a few beggars who work The New Stanley. She's got her eye on one man in particular, a chap with a rather powerful upper body who gets around on a skateboard. He's all torso, the legs of his jeans folded up under the stubs of his thighs to cushion them. Mouse watches while he reaches into a woman's bag and steals not her wallet but her
journal
. Mouse is fascinated, and as shy as she is with me – I don't know it's shyness up until that point, I think she's merely indulging me as her fiancé-to-be's nephew – she strikes up a conversation with the pickpocket who's, quite ironically, also called Stanley. He steals tourists' journals so he can discover what their lives are like. Then he travels back to his village, near the Ethiopian border, where he is considered a wise man and a mystic, and he tells his tribe the white man's secrets.

“At that moment I arrived, and Mouse and I went inside. She told me about Stanley. We tried to imagine how he got into this racket, how he supported himself, what stories he told, and how his village reacted to them. We never got to the production schedule. We both knew without saying it that he would make an incredible documentary. We sat there an hour before we realized no one had come to take our order. We were intoxicated anyway. The idea of working together was…” Tony took a sip of his gin and tonic.

“Go on,” cried Shirl.

“It's rather embarrassing,” he said, “my future mother-in-law.”

“She can take it,” said Mimi.

“We got a room upstairs.”

“Mousie Mousie Mouse!” Mimi shook her head in mock wonder.

“At The New Stanley. We both had houses in town, perfectly big empty houses that were less than fifteen minutes away. It was quite mad –”

“– romantic,” said Shirl. “We're all adults here, right?”

“It was. Well. We quit the BBC. We never worked on
Charles Rydall: Man of Kima
, though I'm told it didn't turn out as bad as it sounded. Uncle Ni was furious, but a good sport. Frankly, I think he was more upset at losing Mouse as a camera operator. We pooled all our resources and made
The New Stanley
. Mouse had been saving most of her salary for just something like this. I had been saving, well, mostly because I had nothing to spend it on. No wife or family. So,
The New Stanley
. So much can go wrong making any movie, but a documentary in Africa… weather, language, health, tribal disputes, you name it. We had none of it. Stanley was a brick, his people, an offshoot of the Turkana, were quite patient and polite. Everything went right – with the production, with Mouse and me.

“Finally, though, after we were done shooting, back in Nairobi to begin post-production, it became apparent that we would not be able to finish unless one of us got a grant or a job. We were living off plantains and rice. I was still underweight due to a bout of dysentery, and Mouse was becoming anemic. We needed to do something. I didn't want her to live like that. It was sad. We knew, somehow, it was the end of something. We blew the rest of our wad on a long weekend in Malindi. Mouse gave me this ring, see? It's carved ebony.

“Uncle Ni heard about our dilemma. We had all this terrific footage shot and nowhere to post it. He offered to donate post-production
services, and told us there were jobs on his next show if we wanted them. Even though Mouse had reassured me a thousand times that she had only dated Ni because she had nothing else to do, and in fact looked on him as an uncle, just as I did, I was still hesitant. I loved Ni, but I did not trust him. Mouse begged me. We needed the money. We said yes to Ni, then, it turned out, there was only one job, an assistant editor position. For Mouse.

“She worked long hours. She was never home. Even though Ni had given us the use of the BBC post-production facility, she was always too busy to work on
The New Stanley
. I felt somehow banished, deserted. Then, after moping about for weeks on end, I got offered a job on a French production shooting in Rwanda. An update on the mountain gorillas for French television, I heard about it through Flora, remember Flora? The production assistant on the West German elephant-poaching film. Mouse was a little too anxious for me to take it, so I did. To punish her. She says now she just wanted me to do whatever it was I had to do to be happy, but I thought she was trying to get rid of me.

“I was in Rwanda for three months. Not a peep from Mouse for the first three weeks. Up there in the fog, in the forest, with the gorillas. It was difficult and boring. I was sure she had taken up with Uncle Ni. I had the entire scenario in my head. I suppose this is all a way of justifying –”

“– you had an affair with Flora,” said Mimi.

“– with Dominique, the director.”

“That dummy. If I was going out with you I'd never let you out of my sight,” said Mimi.

“I was miserable,” said Tony.

“She could have… what do they do over there? Send signals with drums?” said Shirl.