Seamus was a well-built, beer-drinking man. He was as tall as he was wide, and sported a liberally grown beard, the kind a devout Sikh might wear to a temple on a Guru’s remembrance day and be showily proud of. He had beady eyes, bloodshot red, and thin arms that made his wrists appear scraggy. Physically, he had changed greatly since he and Jeebleh had last met. Younger, of course, and handsomer then, he had been much leaner too, clean-shaven and with a waist that might have been the envy of many a model. But Jeebleh would have recognized him anywhere, despite his girth.
Jeebleh let go first, so as to hold his friend at a look-and-see distance, and eventually to hug him yet again, even if briefly and more for effect.
Bile, who had been standing nearby, watching the goings-on, now sneaked out of the apartment. Neither friend paid him mind.
“Mogadiscio has been awful to you!” Seamus said.
Jeebleh noted a characteristic of Seamus’s that hadn’t changed: he exploded into a room, like a missile arriving on the quiet and detonating with a rush of excitement. His entry today was not as dramatic as it used to be, and he was quieter on the whole, growing only moderately louder the more he spoke. Would he make his usual sharp, insightful comments? Jeebleh, who associated him with an impressive presence, wore a wary expression, similar to that of a dog on whose pee-marked territory a wily cat has begun to trespass.
“My clansmen have been awful.”
Seamus went to the kitchen to make coffee, and Jeebleh followed. Seamus had unkempt fingernails, edgily bitten and dirty. His toenails were long, so long they put Jeebleh in mind of a museum postcard of a Neanderthal man in all his excessive wildness, as imagined and drawn by a modern illustrator. Jeebleh guessed that his wife’s remarks about unruly toenails would have cut Seamus to the quick, and made him deal with their disorderliness. Maybe he could grow his fingernails and toenails as long as he pleased because he wasn’t sharing his life or his bed with a partner.
“Bile’s told me how they behaved, your clansmen,” Seamus said. “What a repulsive lot! Fancy asking you to pay for the repairs of their war machine. Do they think you are a warlord? They don’t know you as well as some of us think we do. But what cheek!”
“I told them off.”
“Glad you told them to sod off!” Seamus was getting a little excited, and louder. “I know how you feel. I told mine off, whingers the lot of them. I told them to naff off, the moaners. I was a little tyke then, and I haven’t lived in Ireland since, because of my family. How I hate whingers. But you want to know what I think? I think you must be careful next time you meet any of them, if there is a next time. They’ll stick a knife in your back, easy as taking a toffee from a baby. They’re all plunderers, every single one of them. But then, you know that, don’t you?”
“I do!” Jeebleh agreed.
“And they bury you fast here,” Seamus said.
“Don’t worry. I won’t let them.”
“Good for you!”
“I refuse to die. My family wouldn’t want me buried here. My wife is an American, you know, and calls this place ‘a jerkwater of a ruin.’ I’ve other responsibilities elsewhere, a loving family to love.”
“Glad to hear it.”
There was a brief pause.
Jeebleh said, “It’s lovely to see you.”
“You know what pisses me off?” Seamus said.
“Tell me.”
“What pisses me off no end is how easily they dispense with the formality of a postmortem. They cart you off and away with the enthusiasm of a two-pot screamer heading for the pub, murmuring a few verses. I won’t stand for any of that. I’ve drawn up my will, and Bile has a notarized copy of it in the event of anything unexpected. I don’t wish to be planted in the earth fast. In fact, the mere thought of it kills me. I’ve provided Bile with a pile of cash locked in the safe. I want to be flown out of here, with the leisured slowness of an Irishman, and I want a wake and lots of drinking and feasting. That’s what I want!”
Then all at once, he wore an expression that Jeebleh didn’t know how to interpret. He remembered Seamus’s charming cheekiness, his posturing, his clowning.
“How’s your mother?” Jeebleh asked.
Seamus looked sad, and exhausted from jet lag. The color rose in his cheeks, and he said, “She’s tough as nails, and obstinately holding on. Thanks for asking.” His eyes dimmed and after a pause he said, “Sorry about yours. Please accept my belated condolences.”
Jeebleh looked steadily at Seamus as he poured coffee from the espresso machine into two cups, then passed one over. “Tell me your latest,” he said, “and then let’s work our way back to when we last met.”
“I’ve just come from Ireland,” Seamus said, obliging, “with a duffel bag of money to top up what Bile and I had between us, so we can keep The Refuge going until we run out of charity money again. As you can see, we’re all fine, may God help us, and the fat is not in the fire yet! We’re optimistic, despite the disappearance of our dearest, Raasta and Makka.”
“I’m not sure Bile’s told me how you got here the first time,” Jeebleh said. “If he has, I don’t remember. Anyway, he and I still have to catch up with each other. It is a bit of a blur, all that I’ve learned. So why Mogadiscio?”
Seamus was so still that Jeebleh thought he had seen a green-eyed fairy. “My life was gathering dust,” he said, “cobwebs forming in the corners, because of my nine-to-five job. The more the dust gathered, the more fits of uglies I had. I traveled a lot, but my travels were always work-related. I would spend a week in New York, two in Bangkok, a couple of days in Melbourne, then a month in New York, and another in Nairobi, always traveling and always working. I was in terrific demand as a simultaneous interpreter, and the pay was top-notch. I couldn’t complain about being everyone’s favorite, but it was getting to me.”
“What’s wrong with pegging away at work?”
“I hated becoming a gun for hire,” Seamus said. “You’ll remember I speak seven languages that are understood in areas of the world held apart by the guttural, the tonal, the diphthong, and other tongue-twisting differences. Well, I was on the road for long stretches of time. I made pots of money, but that wasn’t good enough, and I was on the verge of freaking out. I was lonely, and my life felt as though it had no purpose.”
Jeebleh said, “What passport do you travel on?”
“British.”
“Your loyalty lies with Britain or Ireland?”
A lightning sense of humor flashed in Seamus’s eyes, and he grinned. When Jeebleh looked at him, puzzled, Seamus said, “Funny you should ask that.”
Jeebleh waited patiently. In Padua, Seamus used to describe himself as “a colonial”! And since he was at a loss to find an equivalent word in Italian, he would often just use the English, and explain it to those who had no idea what he was talking about.
Now he said, “My loyalties do not lie with the Union Jack, for sure. Mine’s an all-inclusive Irish loyalty, with a good measure of cosmopolitanism. The idea of owing allegiance to a country is foreign to me.”
“You haven’t answered, Why Mogadiscio?”
“Because Mogadiscio was there, in Africa!”
“What about Mogadiscio? What about Africa?”
“I used to donate a little more than a third of my earnings to charities in Africa, when cobwebs laden with the memories of a spider started to waylay me. Thinking of our friendship and our closeness turned to Africa into a cause. For me, Africa became my cause!”
“You never thought of Ireland that way?”
“No. I ruined Ireland for myself a long time ago, did some things there I couldn’t go back and live with.”