He noticed that she was holding an unlighted cigarette in her hand.
‘Can you give me a light?’ she asked as if he were a stranger.
Morgan sighed inwardly. He’d have to put a stop to this now. He stood up. ‘Look, I told you, no smoking.’
The cigarette drooped between her lips. ‘You have never come for three days,’ she said sulkily. ‘What am I supposed to do? And then you tell my guest to go,’ she added accusingly.
‘I didn’t tell him, he just went,’ Morgan said, then, wondering why he felt he had to defend himself, burst out: ‘Anyway, I don’t give a good God damn. When I give up smoking you do too, and no questions asked. What do you think it’s like for me to kiss you?’
She looked coy at this.
‘And,’ Morgan went on, ‘who was your ‘guest’ anyway? Sonny or whatever.’
She put the cigarette down on the table and secured the tuck in her towel. ‘It was my brother,’ she said flatly. Morgan felt his indignation seeping away. He tried to keep his eyes off the way her large breasts splayed beneath the towel, tried to ignore the tickle in his groin; he had to see this out first.
‘I thought you said you had no brothers.’
‘Yes, from my mother. This is same father different mother.’ She looked at him unperturbed. Morgan considered the veracity of her story: there was no way he could compete under these circumstances.
‘All right,’ he said grudgingly, ‘but I don’t want him to come here again, OK?’
♦
Morgan dropped the condom in the tin waste-paper basket under the sink in the bathroom. He was still being cautious. Murray had told him to ‘use the sheath at all times’. It was typical of Murray to call it a sheath, he thought; he could still hear the man’s dry Scottish accent. It was typical also, he reflected bitterly, how Murray’s influence reached into the most private areas of his life. He shook his head in resigned disbelief, it was uncanny how it happened. But also he was still not entirely happy with Hazel’s explanation of Sonny’s presence and he didn’t feel like taking any chances. He always expected Hazel to make a fuss about him using contraceptives and the implications they had, especially as he had forced her to go on the pill a couple of months ago, but she had made no visible sign or comment as he had laboriously rolled it down over his flagging erection. The fan had been turned up to full and had swept the bed with cool draughts, drying the sweat on his buttocks and back.
Afterwards, he found he could still taste the Fanshawes’ sherry in his mouth for some reason, and had sent a protesting Hazel out for some more beer to wash it away. ‘If you hadn’t given it to bloody Sonny-boy you wouldn’t have to go, would you?’ he had satisfyingly rebuked her.
While she was away he had decided to run a bath. This simple act was equally unreliable and ridden with pitfalls. He turned on the cold tap and for a full minute all he heard was a muted whistle of air, then the tap juddered, gave a couple of metallic snorts and a low-pressure stream haltingly flowed out for a while, filling the bath with two inches of water, before it was reduced to an ineffectual dribble. Morgan carefully lowered his sweaty body into this, gasping as his genitals were immersed. He soaped himself as best he could and splashed the lather off. Hazel brought him his beer and he sat for ten minutes or so in the bath sipping direct from the bottle. Presently a benign alcoholic haze began to fog all his undesirable memories. He turned on the tap again, found the pressure had built up and washed his hair.
When he stepped out of the bath he saw Hazel sitting in her bra and pants painting her fingernails. Morgan drained his beer bottle. There were two good things about living in Africa, he told himself convivially: just two. Beer and sex. Sex and beer. He wasn’t sure in what order he’d place them — he was indifferent really — but they were the only things in his life that didn’t consistently let him down. They sometimes did, but not in the randomly cruel and arbitrary way that the other features of the world conspired to confuse and frustrate him. They were as reliable as anything in this dreadful country, he thought, and, he reflected smugly, feeling more buoyant and pleased with himself all of a sudden, he was certainly getting enough of both.
He dried himself leisurely. Hazel had switched on her transistor radio and low monotonous soul-music issued from the crackling loud-speaker. Morgan thought about ordering it silenced but decided to be obliging and refrain. Hazel was reliable too, he thought kindly: well, almost, in her own bizarre way. He was grateful to her.
Standing rigidly to attention and craning his head forward Morgan could just see the tip of his penis beyond the burgeoning swell of his pot-belly. Beer and sex, he thought. When he couldn’t see it any more he’d go on a diet. He continued to pass the towel regularly over his body but it was no longer having any effect: he wasn’t wet exactly, but remained distinctly moist. He padded through to the bedroom and stood in front of the standard fan. He took a large tin of talcum powder from Hazel’s crowded dressing table and liberally dusted his armpits and groin. When his pubic hairs had turned a ghostly white he pulled on his underpants — pale blue billowing boxer shorts. This had been another of Murray’s recommendations. There was the man again, Morgan seethed, but he had to admit it made sense, and it was comfortable. Kin-janja’s humid clime was not suited for tight, genital-bunching hipster briefs: you had to let the air get to those dark dank places.
He caught a glimpse of a section of his torso in Hazel’s dressing-table mirror. Fat lapped over the waist band of his boxer shorts. He was particularly distressed by the two pads that had seemingly clamped themselves immovably to his back — like tenacious alien parasites — in the region of his kidneys. He was getting too large: fifteen and a half stone at the last weigh-in. He winced at the memory. He had always been on the biggish side; in his beefy adolescence his mother had tactfully described him as ‘big-boned’, though ‘burly’ was how he now liked to see himself. He was of average height, around five foot nine or ten, and had always cut a stocky figure but in his getting-on-for-three years in Nkongsamba he had put on almost two stones and his silhouette seemed to bulk larger every week.
He crouched down and peered over Hazel’s shoulder at his face in the mirror. He fingered his jaw-line. Christ, he thought with some alarm, the bone is half an inch below the surface. He stretched his neck from side to side, turning his head and squinting at his profile. He had a broad face, it could carry the extra flesh not too badly, he reckoned. He smiled at himself, his strong smile, showing all his teeth. There was something vaguely Brandoish about him, he felt. Hazel looked up from her nail painting, thought he was smiling at her and smiled back.
Standing up he inflated his chest, sucked in his gut and flexed his buttocks. He didn’t really look thirty-four, he decided, that is, if you ignored his hair. His hair was the bane of his life: it was fine and wispy, pale reddish-brown and falling out. His temples took over more of his head every month. Somehow his widow’s peak held on, a hirsute promontory in an expanding sea of forehead. If his bloody receding didn’t stop soon, he reflected, he’d end up looking like a Huron Indian or one of those demented American Marines, currently wasting the inhabitants of South — East Asia, who shaved their heads leaving only a prickly stripe running down the centre. Gently, with all ten finger tips, he teased the soft hair across his brow: it was too sad really.
Back in his clothes he returned his attention to Hazel. She was spending a long time preparing herself for something, and it wasn’t for him. He looked around the room and its tawdriness set his spirits in the now familiar slide: the frame metal bed with its thin dunlopillo mattress, the cheap local furnishings, the bright ceiling light with its buzzing corona of flying insects and Hazel’s garish mini-skirts and shifts cast around the room as haphazardly as seaweed on a beach.