White Lies. Dexter Petley

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СКАЧАТЬ was wearing a bottle-green corduroy jacket. Round face, short, squat, out of breath. He slipped his hand into his jacket and showed me a green wage packet.

      —Not me, he said. This is all I have.

      I walked back to the traffic lights.

      —Pssst. Pssst. The silly cunt thought I hadn’t seen him standing there. Even the Nairobi City Council gardeners were leaning on their tools watching the two thieves meet up again.

      —Psst. You ran after the wrong man, he said. You, a fool, shouting like that you get me killed. Now we go. Split five-five. Five thousand you, five thousand me. Aieee you fool. Say sorry.

      —Sorry.

      —That is okay. We are friends.

      He clutched the money through his clothes. I suppose he’d earned custodial rights, but my self-evaluation was declining. I’d overacted the part. I’d take a thousand bob now just to get gone. But why should he have the nine thousand?

      —Where you going? I asked.

      —Walk, he say. Look for place.

      He was fiddling with the packet now and pulled out the chit.

      —Look. Ten thousand shillings.

      It said Kenya Transport Co. Mombasa 6,000/-. Nairobi 4,000/-. I could take my half to the Transport office and get the loser off the hook but I wanted to go to Tanzania one day. I wanted to give Austen five hundred bob. I had to pay three hundred shillings for my new passport. I found myself telling all this to my new friend, so he didn’t think I’d betray him. I showed him more holes in my clothes and said I couldn’t pay the doctor for some medicine and didn’t even have any underpants. He said soon I would have a lot of money.

      We walked to Club 1900. He hesitated.

      —No way, I said and walked on.

      He caught me up and started to jibber.

      —It is our lucky day. One time, before, I found nine thousand dollars in Mombasa and bought a Volvo. Five thousand shillings, it is nothing to me. This is true, I have eighty thousand shillings on me.

      He started to look ridiculous, a parody of suspicion, tracing and retracing his steps, peering off the road at any path or hideout. We were down among the wholesale shops, the dry goods, the Asian importers and office suppliers. Old Nairobi, low colonial stores, shoe shops, seamstresses, the smell of cotton and leather and printers’ ink. Cool, tidy, dusty shops with atriums and balconies where gentle but highly strung Patels sat at colossal rolltop desks looking down into the shop below. I’d begun to go there to change my currency, just paltry sums like a ten-dollar bill, but I was always invited to draw up a chair under the ceiling fan to drink a Pepsi and to listen to their gripes about police harassment, bent customs officers, greedy relatives in St Leonards.

      —Give me twenty steps, he said. I am turning off this road on the corner.

      He pointed to a rubbish patch, a wasteland with paths that crisscrossed between the ditches and the warehouses. It was lunchtime. Workers lounged in groups, Asian shopgirls smoking and drinking tea, messengers in flipflops chucking mango skins in the gutter. They all watched as I waited for my signal. It came from a ridge a hundred yards away. He beckoned, like he was digging a hole with one hand, before squatting under banana fronds. A hundred people saw me pick my way over to the sewage drain.

      —Were you seen? he says.

      I felt sick. I’d used up a whole day’s energy and shouldn’t have been slagging on an empty stomach after two weeks throwing up chloroquine. My legs were too weak to squat and I got the shakes. He was waving the packet in the air.

      —Your lucky day. My lucky day. Which day you born?

      He gave me the chit. I was born yesterday.

      —You destroy it. Tear it up.

      I struck a match but he blew it out.

      —No, just tear.

      I tore it up and wanted to ditch it where it would be carried away on the flowing scum.

      —Now just put it down, he said.

      As I sprinkled the fragments he wanted me to squat. The notes were half eased from the envelope when I saw a man come over the ridge.

      —There are some people, I said.

      Now the man in the green cord jacket smiled at me.

      —They’ve followed us, I said.

      —Ah, he said. They are the police. Just sit here.

      The man in the cord jacket smiled at me again

      and came across to shake hands.

      —How are you? he said. We go to the police now.

      I got up and followed him across the ditch and got wet feet. I was ushered under another banana bush with more urgency now. This was it, a beating, and I’d nothing to bribe them with except perhaps my jacket. We all squatted. Were the police already under the banana bush? I couldn’t see the shopgirls any more. My companion showed them the money.

      —Here, all of it. We are not taking any of it. It is all here.

      —The cheque, the man in the green cord jacket said. The chit. Where is this?

      He turned to me:

      —Did you have any outside money?

      We were both searched. Why was I so silent? There was no chit. Only my photographs which they handed round, then gave back. In my half-delirium I thought: why couldn’t they see they were of him? Why couldn’t they see I’d stolen his face.

      —This man, my companion was saying. He didn’t know. He is nothing to do with it.

      They looked at me.

      —That’s right, I said, pointing to the man in the green cord jacket. Ask this man.

      He said: this is true.

      A policeman took me aside.

      —I’m sick, I said. It was all I could say but it worked.

      —You go now. If you come to the police station this man will change his story and blame everything on you. That officer likes your pen.

      I gave him my metal Parker ballpoint and wondered, what would Joy think of me now?

       FIVE

      Until we found Le Haut Bois, me and Joy were living on the campsite at Putanges. It was the summer of 1994 when Normandy was green with rain and convoys of old British Army trucks and American jeeps that had come over for the D-Day fiftieth anniversary. Solemn old men in berets, anciens combattants spattered in medals, saluted at war memorials lined with bombshells painted grey. Shy Welsh boys dressed like soldiers in fatigues СКАЧАТЬ