My Name is N. Robert Karjel

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       3

      Heike wasn’t home. She’d taken to working late, getting all virtuous since she’d started on her health kick. She’d stopped smoking, which meant I didn’t have to listen to the tar bubbling in the stem of those plastic holders she used to use. She’d hung up her drinking waders too, except for the odd glass of wine at dinner. I’d always thought her beautiful even with her vices, maybe because of her vices, now, without them she was the same but just more so. The health aura seemed to bring out her intelligence too, or maybe she just remembered things when all the parking spaces weren’t taken up by hangovers. I confess, it was making me nervous having her out there in this condition.

      I waved at Helen, our cook, who was out on the balcony grilling chicken. I stripped and showered off Carlo’s beer shampoo. I tried not to think about Jean-Luc Marnier or Roberto Franconelli by thinking about my first night with Heike instead. How we’d met in the desert, she with her girlfriend in a live Hanomag truck, me on my own in a dead car being towed behind.

      We’d stopped and eaten dinner around a fire, it being brisk in the desert at night. She hadn’t said a word to me, the girlfriend did all the talking. Afterwards I went for a walk by myself to look at the stars, breathe in the emptiness and feel the African continent pulsating under my feet, thumping in my chest as if I had a bull’s heart.

      I thought I was on my own but then Heike was next to me. We exchanged looks but still no words and in a matter of moments we’d struggled and wrenched ourselves out of our disobedient clothes and were lying naked on the desert floor in a mad, frantic embrace. Our limbs and genitals locked together, the live ground pumping something so exotic through us we shouted when we came. The girlfriend had heard the ruckus and was forced to ask shyly and from some way off whether Heike was all right. Heike had croaked something back at her which she must have heard before from cheap hotel rooms, backs of cars, dark garden ends, because the clear desert air carried her gooseberry weariness back to us.

      Having dispatched some of the nastiness, I wedged myself in amongst the floor cushions, stiffened myself with a gulp of Red Label and opened the envelope Carlo had given me. There was 250,000 CFA in it, $300, enough for 48 hours work plus expenses. There was also the other item. A newspaper cutting from the Guardian in Lagos. This is what it said:

      Yesterday a police autopsy revealed that Gale Strudwick, who was discovered dead in the swimming pool at her home on Victoria Island three days ago, had died of drowning. A police spokesman said: ‘There was a large quantity of alcohol in her system and she had recently eaten a heavy meal. We do not suspect any foul play.’ Friends had described her as ‘severely depressed’ after her husband, Graydon Strudwick, died of renal failure in Akimbola Awoliyi Memorial Hospital in March.

      I sank the whisky in my glass and poured another good two inches and socked it back. Then I poured another inch and in the spirit calm thought that must have been one hell of a meal to sink her to the bottom of the pool, and Gale was not a big eater. She wasn’t a depressive either, not about Graydon, anyway.

      Gale Strudwick had been a friend, someone I’d known from my London days who, before she’d confused herself with money, sex and power, I’d liked as well. We’d got ourselves knotted up together in some bad business with Roberto Franconelli and her husband three or four months back. We’d both witnessed some example-setting from the Italian one night which had left me feeling like never talking again in my life, especially about football. Gale was a drinker and more lippy, more provocative, more aggressive about the money she needed to maintain the five-mile-high lifestyle she craved and which she wasn’t going to get from her dead husband’s estate. The cutting was a warning: Be sweet and you shall continue, be sour and you shall be sucking СКАЧАТЬ