Now I was nervous we weren’t getting to the point. I thought for a moment I’d had my hands full of initiative but it was just sweat and soggy chinos after all. Madame Sokode wanted to talk. She’d just picked her father up from the airport where he’d flown in from London after some treatment or other she didn’t want to talk about. Now he was dispatched, she wanted to rack up some tongue miles. I didn’t have that much of a point to get to so for me dawdling with the yakety-yak didn’t seem a bad option except ... this went on for three hours.
In those three hours we covered the ground Die had in fourteen seconds. We also changed location. I took her up to her new house, just recently finished, at the back of an almost American-style middle-income housing estate in Ikeja.
‘I like being near the airport,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be down there on Vic Island a five-hour traffic jam from anywhere. The air’s better too.’
Interesting stuff.
She didn’t get to talk to too many interesting people by the sounds of things, or at them, even. She told me how much she disliked Lagos society and the expectations of family and friends. She didn’t go out much, maybe up to the Sheraton for a drink, but that was it. She talked about her family, trashed them heavily, including old rhino. The friends didn’t cut it either. The girls were all sluts and the boys ... well, just as you’d have thought given the girls.
And, as you know, Mr Medway,’ she said, ‘that’s a very dangerous state of affairs in this day and age.’
I didn’t know why that ‘you’ had to take such a heavy stress.
A watchman opened up the steel gates to let us in on a short, straight drive up to the house which was a big neo-colonial affair with a red-tiled roof and long shuttered windows. It had a pillared and netted verandah out the front overlooking a garden with mature palms and plenty of building detritus. She led me up long wide steps to the front door, which was not opened by a servant.
‘The furniture hasn’t arrived yet,’ she said, as if this explained the lack of staff.
She unlocked the door and leaned into it. It was hotter inside than out. She flipped the light switch and a monsoon of cut glass lit up in the roof above a double staircase which went up to what she was already telling me was eight bedrooms with bathrooms en suite. Looking forward to having all those family members and friends she liked so much.
‘I couldn’t wait to get out of my father’s house,’ she said, showing me into a living room with a three-piece suite, a table and nothing else but acres of parquet flooring. ‘Drink?’
I’d been inches off flipping the glove and chugging the Bell’s all the way out here so I went for the drink and let her know the kind of measure required, but not the amount of paranoia it had to quell. What was I doing here? She told me to wander the house, tell her what I thought. I said she could turn on the air conditioning if she liked, but she didn’t like ... she didn’t have.
She then unnerved me by leaving from one door and reappearing through another with a large whisky, then floating off again and coming up behind me soundlessly on bare feet in a lime-green minidress. I lagged a few yards behind as she led me into yet another stately-home-sized room and found that she’d vanished when I got in there. Snuck into some double-doored closet built into the wall, only to shiver me down again by ghosting into the corner of my eye in a tiger-striped top and ankle-length skirt ensemble.
The whole performance put me in mind of the great white hunter pursuing the cunning cat only to find himself getting manoeuvred into the killing spot.
After the seven-bedroom tour (all empty, the eighth was hers and private) she took me back downstairs to the living room and we sat on the hot easy chairs opposite each other, the sofa vacant between us. I drank. She didn’t. She didn’t open any of the shutters on the windows in the room, either, and the one thousand cubic feet of brilliantly lit space around us was as thick as New York subway air.
‘I lied to you before,’ she said.
Here we go.
‘About what?’
‘The furniture.’
‘When it’s coming, you mean?’
‘I cancelled it. Do you think that’s strange?’
‘Only if you like clutter.’
‘I had a German boyfriend once,’ she said, as if the word ‘clutter’ had reminded her.
‘What was his name?’ I asked, trying to get into the spirit, wanting to get out of here badly.
‘Helmut,’ she said, as if I’d just questioned her integrity.
‘And Helmut was into squash-court living?’ I asked. ‘Or was his name Klutter?’
Wrong sense of humour. Her mouth hardened up on me.
‘No.’
‘I mean did he like space? Clean lines? Freedom from the trappings of consumer society?’
‘No. He was a homosexual,’ she said, derailing the clutter conversation.
‘Madame Sokode,’ I started and then decided to do some derailing myself. ‘Why are you called “Madame” if you’re Nigerian?’
‘I’m not “Mrs”, I can’t stand “Ms”, nobody’s going to call me “Miss” at my age and “Sistah” is out of the question. I did some business in Francophone West Africa, they called me “Madame”. I liked it. You can call me Elizabeth if you want,’ she said, as if this wasn’t her real name but would do for the evening.
I’d painted myself into a corner with nowhere to go but the point, but how to start? Do you do virgins for export? No. Mine’s another double and then I must get going. A question like that gets out into the open and nothing stays the same. There was also the fear that Daniel had shot me some shit about Madame Sokode, that she was just as Die had painted her and I was going to drop a stink bomb from which all we could do was sprint.
‘Mr Medway?’
‘Bruce, Elizabeth,’ I said, snapping out of it.
‘Bruce, I wanted to tell you about Helmut.’
‘I wouldn’t want to invade your privacy,’ I said, a tad Victorian, but I really didn’t need to hear about Helmut.
‘It’s easier to talk to strangers.’
‘As long as they stay that way.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You don’t want to reveal your inner life and then have it paraded around your family and friends.’
‘Oh, I see, I thought you meant you didn’t like being intimate.’
Maybe I didn’t.
‘Surely Helmut was bisexual,’ I said, thinking, we’re not going to get away from the guy so let’s do him and quick.
‘No. He was homosexual. He always preferred boys. It didn’t bother me. Our relationship suited each other. He liked to be seen with a beautiful African woman on his arm and...’ I knew I had to look her in the eye for this, ‘... and I didn’t like sex. Still don’t.’
The relief was substantial.
‘So what happened to...?’
‘Everything in Africa is sex,’ she said, bitterly and with disgust.
‘It’s the only fun there is if you’re living in grinding poverty.’
‘You were going to ask me something,’ she said, not enjoying the concept of a billion people hoeing their way to a night’s satisfying rut.
‘So what happened to Helmut if you suited each other so well?’
‘He died.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘Helmut was a great card player and I can assure you he had a very good understanding of probability.’
‘AIDS?’
‘He was very reckless.’
My drink was over and I’d just sent the instructions to my legs to get up and out of there when Elizabeth whipped my glass off me and set off across Lake Parquet. She came back with the tumbler half full. I took it with both hands.
‘Unfortunately,’ she said, sitting down, legs underneath her, ‘I was too. One night.’
‘Not reckless, I hope.’
‘That’s why I cancelled the furniture.’
Conversation not derailed after all, very much on line. The whisky glass rattled on my teeth making an idiot of myself. She laughed, out came the pointy teeth, snapped shut.
‘When I first saw you,’ she said. ‘I thought we had something in common.’
‘I’m not HIV positive if you’re asking.’
‘I didn’t mean that,’ she said. ‘I thought we’d both lost something valuable to us.’
‘Well, I might have just lost my wife,’ I said, the whisky talking now. ‘I mean my girlfriend.’
‘Which?’
‘Girlfriend. She’s pregnant. That’s why I keep calling her my wife. She corrects me ... every time. She would have if she were here. She’s German too,’ I finished like a complete asshole.
‘Why do you say “might”? You might have just lost her.’
‘I told her I’d been unfaithful.’
‘But I lied.’
‘Then you’re very strange.’
‘It was a very complicated situation.’
‘That wasn’t what I meant about losing something.’
‘I lost my car a few months ago,’ I said. Avoidance tactic.
‘You mean that’s new?’ she said, and smiled without opening her mouth.
‘Your sense of humour’s coming along.’
‘What about your innocence?’
‘Fresh out.’
‘Me too.’
‘I was joking.’
‘I don’t think you were.’
Here we go with the inner child stuff.
‘Where did you lose yours?’ I asked.
‘I’m not talking about virginity,’ she snapped, the last word tripping over her teeth, annoying her.
‘Then what are we talking about?’
‘I told you. That’s what we have in common.’
‘Lost innocence? Well, there must be a hell of a lot of people like us. Most of Lagos for a start. You want to go wandering the streets downtown see how much...’
‘You think so?’
‘I don’t know what you’ve done to lose it.’
‘What I’ve done,’ she said, savagely, beginning to get shrill.
‘Nobody loses it for you.’
‘I didn’t even have a childhood,’ she said, her tight fist beating on the arm of the chair.
This was getting screechy. Her mouth was open nearly all the time now and those teeth with the lips curled back snapped and snarled in the jam-packed air of the room. The sweat sprung out of me, and the chair clung as if I was its last possible chance at happiness. I gripped the arms while Elizabeth Sokode went off on a rant.
‘I’m not African, I’m not white, I’m not even halfcaste. I’m a nothing. I don’t belong anywhere. I take the bits I like from both cultures but none of it is me. Do you know where I went for my school holidays?’ she asked, thumping her stomach with her fist as if she’d just knifed herself.
‘No.’
‘School.’
I nearly laughed at that. It was just too damn tragic. And if I had it would have come out high and hysterical like a vixen on heat barking to the full moon. But for her, with her black shiny eyes flashing over me, the horror was still fresh, the abandonment a blight that had ruined her.
‘I’m surprised you still see your father,’ I said.
‘He was a weak man.’
‘And your mother?’
Her limbs were folding back down again now having been wildly overextended and she lapsed into silence. I dropped a couple of gulps to keep the glare down in the room.
‘You have no idea,’ she said after some time.
An aircraft took off loudly overhead. I had the whisky down to half an inch. My face felt hard and fat like whale blubber.
‘That’ll be the last plane out tonight,’ she said.
I saw her spending night after night in her empty palace counting aeroplanes and imaginary slights.
‘The rain’s coming now,’ she said.
‘I was thinking I’ve got to be going.’
‘Not for an hour or two. The rain’s coming. Listen.’
The palm trees were wilding outside, hissing and clapping. Elizabeth got up and opened some French windows and the shutters out on to the verandah. Cool air blasted into the room. She shuddered and left, taking my glass from me on the way. I went out and up to the mosquito netting. The garden was floodlit now and I could see the dog runs around the high walls, the angled razor wire on top.
The brushes started on the snare—the unmistakable sound of a line of heavy rain moving across the city.
Elizabeth reappeared in designer blue jeans and a fat, cream rollneck which came up to her nose. She handed me my refill. Another three inches. The wind drove the rain over the walls, through the palm trees and it crashed on to the house. The lights in the garden blurred. Madame Sokode looked out like an animal but not one that felt safe or protected by the rain, rather a predator that could see rich pickings after. She hugged herself and spoke without taking her eyes off the rain.
‘I get cold very easily,’ she said.
‘Maybe you’re more African than you think.’
‘I can’t eat fish-head soup or grass cutter,’ she said, ‘I can’t stomach manioc or cassava.’
‘You’ve got to be brought up on that stuff.’
‘Why did you come and see me today?’ she asked suddenly, as if I’d had romantic intentions or regretted a bust-up.
‘A proposal,’ I said.
‘How did you hear about me?’
‘In the business community in Benin. Names get thrown around. I don’t remember where I heard yours. The High Commission told me where to find you.’
‘What is this proposal?’
‘Can I just use your lavatory before we get into this?’
‘You’ll have to go upstairs in one of the bedrooms. The downstairs isn’t plumbed in yet.’
I ran like a madman up the stairs, eyes bugged, tongue out on its stalk, trying to shed some of that unbearable tension. I saw on the landing that her bedroom door was ajar and I couldn’t resist a peek.
It was the smallest room in the house. The walls bare apart from a poster of a young white movie heart-throb. The bed was single and on it were cuddly toys—two dolls, a wild-haired troll and four plastic ponies with lurid tails. There were books, lots of them in a floor-to-ceiling bookcase. A nightmare read of romantic slush—table settings and princes, linen and love.
A door slammed below. I got out and took a long shuddering leak. I found my face had set in a plastic half laugh in the mirror.
Elizabeth was pacing the verandah, arms folded, thick mountaineer’s socks on her feet. I sucked a half inch off the whisky.
‘Are you interested in gold?’ I asked.
‘Is this a business proposal?’
It’s not a marriage proposal.
‘I wanted to know if you’d be interested in buying some Ashante gold,’ I said.
‘How much?’
‘Around two thousand ounces, just under a million dollars’ worth.’
She stopped and stared into the floor for a moment. The business brain flickering. The number of emotional cripples and close to certifiably insane people who hold down top jobs and run business empires—it’s amazing. Maybe that’s what it took ... being a kid without the innocence—single-minded, total aggression, fuzzy concepts of good and bad, right and wrong, and a desperate need for total playground dominance. Was that the only way I could justify my own failure?
‘Yes,’ she said, and the rain stopped so suddenly she turned around. ‘That could be very interesting, depending on the price, and the usual quality and delivery.’
‘Where do you want it delivered?’
‘Here in Nigeria.’
‘When?’
‘Immediately as possible.’
‘Quality?’
‘I have someone who can help on that.’
‘And price?’
‘It would be interesting for me if you could accept part money and part goods in kind.’
‘Perhaps that depends on your principal’s interests.’
‘Maybe I’m the principal.’
‘I don’t think so,’ she said.
Arguing with that kind of shrewdness was just going to wear out my tonsils.