‘Was,’ Blanchaille contradicted her. ‘Was once.’
‘Well, anyway, why tell you? You’ve seen more of infant mortality than I ever will. But that’s my piece and you’re welcome to it. Now it’s Happy’s turn. She’ll give you a different view of things.’
Happy, tall, black, appeared with Visser leaning gratefully on her arm. She took a seat between Freia and Blanchaille and ordered a highball. Her hair was drawn up in a great dark crown and seeded with what looked like pearls. Her fingernails were painted pink. Her manner was strident, even aggressive and Blanchaille shifted uneasily. Freia caught his eye and winked. Takes all sorts,’ she whispered sympathetically, ‘that’s the trouble.’ Happy glared. Freia fell silent. Blanchaille sighed and turned to Happy. He was being punished with parables.
‘I worked in the house of my Minister from about the age of fourteen onwards. Because my Minister was powerful I learnt things and because I learnt things I went places. My Minister’s department decided that it was no good dealing with our northern black neighbours as we’d done in the old colonial times with the white men lording it over blacks. In the new age black must speak to black and so I became a negotiator, that’s to say I dealt with heads of state and political officials in the enemy states to the north. Since as you may know, they buy the works from us — power, food, transport, arms, everything from nappies to canned fruit — I used to say to them, look, this is our price, take it or leave it. Sometimes I’d get a lot of opposition. Some big hero of the African revolution, chest clinking with medals, would meet me at the National Redeemer Airport and say: “Jesus Christ! You’re black, Happy, you’re one of us, how can you help them to bleed us to death?” And I’d say, “Man — we take forty thousand mine workers a year from you, and if you don’t like the arrangement and the price per head we’re quoting then fine — don’t send them. Or maybe you’d prefer that instead of remitting their salaries to you in toto, direct, we might consider paying the poor bastards individually and in that case half your national income goes out the window…” Allow me to present you with a photograph of my Minister.’
Before he could refuse Happy thrust a photograph in his hands. Involuntarily he glanced at it: ‘Kuiker, of course.’
This delighted his audience who clapped their hands and echoed him: ‘Kuiker, of course.’
The face of a pugilist, of an all-in wrestler. The flesh kneaded into thick ridges around the jaw-line, eyebrows and lips; nose flat and wide, a bony spur run askew and bedded down in thick flat flesh. The full lips in their charateristic sneer, even when compressed. MINISTER KUIKER WEARING HIS SARDONIC SMILE, the papers said. Thick dark hair combed back from the forehead in stiff, oiled ridges running over his ears and down the back of his neck. He had a taste for shiny suits and bright ties and a paradoxical reputation for unyielding conservatism combined with modern pragmatism. He was solid, powerful and dangerous, this man, the marbled eyes, the petrified hair, the enormous capacity for Scotch, the truculent ties and the cheap fashion jewellery, gold tie-pins with their diamond chips, the skull rings with red-glass bloodshot eyes he affected on both hands. Gus Kuiker was widely tipped to succeed President Bubé when the old man went. His only rival, young ‘Bomber Vollenhoven’, was seen as too inexperienced and too liberal. Kuiker was the mastermind behind President Bubé’s lightning foreign tours and the man responsible for plucking a young statistical clerk by name of Trudy Yssel from a lowly job in the President’s Department for Applied Ethnic Embryology and appointing her to the post of Secretary to the Department of Communications: YSSEL NEW SUPREMO AT DEPCOM, the papers said. KUIKER’S PROPAGANDA OFFENSIVE!