What Am I Doing Here? Read online

  ‘What’s that, daddy?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He did not want me to see something dead.

  ‘Well, it looks to me like a piece of hedgehog.’

  My father was not looking in the box of old photos for the one of himself, but for one of his father’s yacht, the Aireymouse. In the Twenties and Thirties my grandfather, a Birmingham lawyer, owned a vessel of legendary beauty. She was a teak, clipper-bowed ketch built at Fowey in Cornwall in 1898; she had once been rigged as a cutter. An aireymouse is a bat and, under her bowsprit, there was the figurehead of a bat with outstretched wings. The bat had disappeared by my father’s day. Aireymouse had brown sails dyed with cutchbark, a brass ship’s bell, and a gold line from stem to stern.

  My grandfather died in 1933, and Aireymouse had to be sold. She needed expensive repairs to her stanchions. Neither my father nor his brothers and sister could afford them. They sold her for £200. For my father alone it was the loss of a lover.

  He had other boats - the Nocteluca, the Dozmaree, the Nereid, the Sunquest — but he shared them with others, and none matched the boat of his dreams.

  I do not think he could bring himself to find out what had happened to Aireymouse. He heard rumours. In Guernsey a car had driven over the pier and landed on her deck — without doing too much damage. Or she was a rotting house-boat in the mud of a West Country creek. Or an incendiary bomb had hit her in the War. He came to accept that she was gone, but never quite believed it. On our sailing holidays we all believed that one golden evening, off Ushant or in the Race of Alderney, two sails would appear on the horizon and the ethereal craft would heave into view. My father would raise his binoculars and say the words he yearned to say: ‘It’s Aireymouse.’

  He became resigned. My parents no longer went to sea. They bought a camping van and travelled all over Europe. My father kept a sailor’s log-book of their journeys, and read road-maps as if they were charts.

  He had also dreamed of making one trade-wind passage to the West Indies. He never found the time to get away. Too many people depended on his legal advice. He would come home exhausted in the evenings after grappling with the problems of National Health Service hospitals. After his retirement, he had an arthritic hip and I feared he would go into decline. Once the operation had been performed, he was young again.

  Four years ago my brother took him on the trade-wind passage. The boat was a modern yacht to be delivered to Antigua. But the owners had made her top-heavy with expensive junk. In a following sea, she did a fifty-degree roll and they had to turn back to the Cape Verde Islands. My father looked younger than ever after his adventure, but it was a disappointment.

  Three days before Margharita went to hospital, he found himself talking on the phone to a man who said: ‘I’ve been looking for you for a long time.’ Was Charles Chatwin related to the pre-war owners of Aireymouse?

  ‘I am,’ said my father. ‘She was our boat.’

  ‘I’ve bought her,’ the man said.

  The man had found her up the River Dart. He fell in love with her and bought her. He took her to a yard in Totnes. The deck was gone. Many of the oak timbers were gone. But the teak hull was in perfect condition.

  ‘I’m going to reconstruct her,’ the man said. Could he count on Charles’s help?

  Charles will be eighty this year.

  Let us pray he will sail on Aireymouse.

  1988

  2

  STRANGE ENCOUNTERS

  A COUP

  A Story

  The coup began at seven on Sunday morning. It was a grey and windless dawn and the grey Atlantic rollers broke in long even lines along the beach. The palms above the tidemark shivered in a current of cooler air that blew in off the breakers. Out at sea — beyond the surf — there were several black fishing canoes. Buzzards were circling above the market, swooping now and then to snatch up scraps of offal. The butchers were working, even on a Sunday.

  We were in a taxi when the coup began, on our way to another country. We had passed the Hotel de la Plage, passed the Sûreté Nationale, and then we drove under a limply-flapping banner which said, in red letters, that Marxist-Leninism was the one and only guide. In front of the Presidential Palace was a road-block. A soldier waved us to a halt, and then waved us on.

  ‘Pourriture!’ said my friend Domingo, and grinned.

  Domingo was a young, honey-coloured mulatto with a flat and friendly face, a curly moustache and a set of dazzling teeth. He was the direct descendant of Francisco Felix de Souza, a Brazilian slave-dealer about whom I was writing a book.

  Domingo had two wives. The first wife was old and the skin hung in loose folds off her back. The second wife was hardly more than a child. We were on our way to Togo, to watch a football game, and to visit his great-uncle who knew a lot of old stories about the slaver.

  The taxi was jammed with football fans. On my right sat a very black old man wrapped in green and orange cotton. His teeth were also orange from chewing cola nuts, and from time to time he spat.

  Outside the Presidential Palace hung an outsize poster of the Head of State, and two much smaller posters of Lenin and Kim II Sung. Beyond the road-block, we took a right fork, on through the old European section where there were bungalows and balks of bougainvillea by the gates. Along the sides of the tarmac, market-women walked in single file with basins and baskets balanced on their heads.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked. There was some kind of commotion, up ahead, towards the airport.

  ‘Accident!’ Domingo shrugged.

  The women were screaming, and scattering their yams and pineapples, and rushing for the shelter of the gardens. A white Peugeot shot down the middle of the road, swerving right and left to miss the women, and then, we heard the crack of gunfire.

  ‘C’est la guerre!’ our driver shouted, and spun the taxi round.

  ‘I knew it.’ Domingo grabbed my arm. ‘I knew it.’

  The sun was up by the time we got to downtown Cotonou. In the taxi-park the crowd had panicked and overturned a brazier. A stack of crates had caught fire. A policeman blew his whistle and bawled for water. Above the rooftops, there was a column of black smoke, rising.

  ‘They’re burning the Palace,’ said Domingo. ‘Quick! Run!’

  We ran, bumped into other running figures, and ran on. A man shouted, ‘Mercenary!’ and lunged for my shoulder. I ducked and we dodged down a sidestreet. A boy in a red shirt beckoned me into a bar. It was dark inside. People were clustered round a radio. Then the bartender screamed (wildly, in African) at me. And suddenly I was out again on the dusty red street, shielding my head with my arms, pushed and pummelled against the corrugated building by four hard, acridly-sweating men until the gendarmes came to fetch me in a jeep.

  ‘For your own proper protection,’ their officer said, as the handcuffs snapped around my wrists.

  The last I saw of Domingo he was standing in the street, crying, as the jeep drove off, and he vanished in a clash of coloured cottons.

  In the barracks guardroom a skinny boy, stripped to a pair of purple underpants, sat hunched against the wall. His hands and feet were bound with rope, and he had the greyish look Africans get when they are truly frightened. A gecko hung motionless on the whitewash. Outside the door there was a papaya with a tall scaly trunk and yellowing fruit. A mud-wall ran along the far side of the compound. Beyond the wall the noise of gunfire continued, and the high-pitched wailing of women.

  A corporal came in and searched me. He was small, wiry, angular, and his cheekbones shone. He took my watch, wallet, passport and notebook.

  ‘Mercenary!’ he said, pointing to the patch-pocket on the leg of my khaki trousers. His gums were spongy and his breath was foul.

  ‘No,’ I said, submissively. ‘I’m a tourist.’

  ‘Mercenary!’ he shrieked, and slapped my face — not hard, but hard enough to hurt.

  He held up my fountain-pen. ‘What?’

  ‘A pen,’ I said.

&nb
sp; ‘What for?’

  ‘To write with.’

  ‘A gun?’

  ‘Not a gun.’

  ‘Yes, a gun!’

  I sat on a bench, staring at the skinny boy who continued to stare at his toes. The corporal sat cross-legged in the doorway with his sub-machine-gun trained on me. Outside in the yard, two sergeants were distributing rifles, and a truck was loading with troops. The troops sat down with the barrels sticking up from their crotches. The colonel came out of his office and took the salute. The truck lurched off, and he walked over, lumpily, towards the guardroom.

  The corporal snapped to attention, and pointed to me. ‘Mercenary, Comrade Colonel!’

  ‘From today,’ said the colonel, ‘there are no more comrades in our country.’

  ‘Yes, Comrade Colonel.’ the man nodded; but checked himself and added, ‘Yes, my Colonel.’

  The colonel waved him aside and surveyed me gloomily. He wore an exquisitely-pressed pair of paratrooper fatigues, a red star on his cap, and another red star in his lapel. A roll of fat stood out around the back of his neck, his thick lips drooped at the comers. He looked, I thought, so like a sad hippopotamus. I told myself I mustn’t think he looks like a sad hippopotamus. Whatever happens, he mustn’t think I think he looks like a sad hippopotamus.

  ‘Ah, monsieur!’ he said, in a quiet dispirited voice. ‘What are you doing in this poor country of ours?’

  ‘I came here as a tourist.’

  ‘You are English?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you speak an excellent French.’

  ‘Passable,’ I said.

  ‘With a Parisian accent I should have said.’

  ‘I have lived in Paris.’

  ‘I, also, have visited Paris. A wonderful city!’

  ‘The most wonderful city.’

  ‘But you have mistimed your visit to Benin.’

  ‘Yes,’ I faltered. ‘I seem to have run into trouble.’

  ‘You have been here before?’

  ‘Once,’ I said. ‘Five years ago.’

  ‘When Benin was Dahomey.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I used to think Benin was in Nigeria.’

  ‘Benin is in Nigeria and now we have it here.’

  ‘I think I understand.’

  ‘Calm yourself, monsieur.’ His fingers reached to unlock my handcuffs. ‘We are having another little change of politics. Nothing more! In these situations one must keep calm. You understand? Calm!’

  Some boys had come through the barracks’ gate and were creeping forward to peer at the prisoner. The colonel appeared in the doorway, and they scampered off.

  ‘Come,’ he said. ‘You will be safer if you stay with me. Come, let us listen to the Head of State.’

  We walked across the parade-ground to his office where he sat me in a chair and reached for a portable radio. Above his desk hung a photo of the Head of State, in a Fidel Castro cap. His cheeks were a basketwork of scarifications.

  ‘The Head of State’, said the colonel, ‘is always speaking over the radio. We call it the journal parlé. It is a crime in this country not to listen to the journal parlé.’

  He turned the knob. The military music came in crackling bursts.

  Citizens of Benin . . . the hour is grave. At seven hours this morning, an unidentified DC-8 jet aircraft landed at our International Airport of Cotonou, carrying a crapulous crowd of mercenaries . . . black and white . . . financed by the lackeys of international imperialism . . . A vile plot to destroy our democratic and operational regime.

  The colonel laid his jowls on his hands and sighed, ‘The Sombas! The Sombas!’

  The Sombas came from the far north-west of the country. They filed their teeth to points and once, not so long ago, were cannibals.

  ‘. . . lunched a vicious attack on our Presidential Palace

  I glanced up again at the wall. The Head of State was a Somba – and the colonel was a Fon.

  ‘. . . the population is requested to arm itself with stones and knives to kill this crapulous . . . ’

  ‘A recorded message,’ said the colonel, and turned the volume down. ‘It was recorded yesterday.’

  ‘You mean . . . ’

  ‘Calm yourself, monsieur. You do not understand. In this country one understands nothing.’

  Certainly, as the morning wore on, the colonel understood less and less. He did not, for example, understand why, on the nine o’clock communique, the mercenaries had landed in a DC-8 jet, while at ten the plane had changed to a DC-7 turboprop. Around eleven the music cut off again and the Head of State announced a victory for the Government Forces. The enemy, he said, were retreating en catastrophe for the marshes of Ouidah.

  ‘There has been a mistake,’ said the colonel, looking very shaken. ‘Excuse me, monsieur. I must leave you.’

  He hesitated on the threshold and then stepped out into the sunlight. The hawks made swift spiralling shadows on the ground. I helped myself to a drink from his water-flask. The shooting sounded further off now, and the town was quieter. Ten minutes later, the corporal marched into the office. I put my hands above my head, and he escorted me back to the guardroom.

  It was very hot. The skinny boy had been taken away, and on the bench at the back sat a Frenchman.

  Outside, tied to the papaya, a springer spaniel was panting and straining at its leash. A pair of soldiers squatted on their hams and tried to dismantle the Frenchman’s shotgun. A third soldier, rummaging in his game-bag, was laying out a few brace of partridge and a guinea-fowl.

  ‘Will you please give that dog some water?’ the Frenchman asked.

  ‘Eh?’ The corporal bared his gums.

  ‘The dog,’ he pointed. ‘Water!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked.

  ‘The monkeys are wrecking my gun and killing my dog.’

  ‘Out there, I mean.’

  ‘Coup monté.’

  ‘Which means?’

  ‘You hire a plane-load of mercenaries to shoot up the town. See who your friends are and who are your enemies. Shoot the enemies. Simple!’

  ‘Clever.’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘And us?’

  ‘They might need a corpse or two. As proof!’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘I was joking.’

  ‘Thanks all the same.’

  The Frenchman was a water-engineer. He worked up-country, on Artesian wells, and had come down to the capital on leave. He was a short, muscular man, tending to paunch, with cropped grey hair and a web of white laugh-lines over his leathery cheeks. He had dressed himself en mercenaire, in fake python-skin camouflage, to shoot a few game-birds in the forest on the outskirts of town.

  ‘What do you think of my costume?’ he asked.

  ‘Suitable,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  The sun was vertical. The colour of the parade-ground had bleached to a pinkish orange, and the soldiers strutted back and forth in their own pools of shade. Along the wall the vultures flexed their wings.

  ‘Waiting,’ joked the Frenchman.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Don’t mention it.’

  Our view of the morning’s entertainment was restricted by the width of the doorframe. We were, however, able to witness a group of soldiers treating their ex-colonel in a most shabby fashion. We wondered how he could still be alive as they dragged him out and bundled him into the back of a jeep. The corporal had taken the colonel’s radio, and was cradling it on his knee. The Head of State was baying for blood — ‘Mort aux mercenaires soit qu’ils sont noirs ou blancs . . . ’ The urchins, too, were back in force, jumping up and down, drawing their fingers across their throats and chanting in unison, ‘Mort aux mercenaires! . . . Mort aux mercenaires! . . . ’

  Around noon, the jeep came back. A lithe young woman jumped out and started screeching orders at an infantry platoon. She was wearing a mud-stained battledress. A nest of plaits curled, like snakes, fr
om under her beret.

  ‘So,’ said my companion. ‘The new colonel.’

  ‘An Amazon colonel,’ I said.

  ‘I always said it,’ he said. ‘Never trust a teenage Amazon colonel.’

  He passed me a cigarette. There were two in the packet and I took one of them.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I don’t smoke.’

  He lit mine, and then his, and blew a smoke-ring at the rafters. The gecko on the wall hadn’t budged.

  ‘My name’s Jacques,’ he said.

  I told him my own name and he said, ‘I don’t like the look of this.’

  ‘Nor I,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘There are no rules in this country.’

  Nor were there any rules, none that one could think of, when the corporal came back from conferring with the Amazon and ordered us, also, to strip to our underpants. I hesitated. I was unsure whether I was wearing underpants. But a barrel in the small of my back convinced me, underpants or no, that my trousers would have to come down - only to find that I did, after all, have on a pair of pink and white boxer shorts from Brooks Brothers.

  Jacques was wearing green string pants. We must have looked a pretty couple — my back welted all over with mosquito bites, he with his paunch flopping over the elastic — as the corporal marched us out, barefoot over the burning ground, and stood us, hands up, against the wall which the vultures had fouled with their ash-white, ammonia-smelling droppings.

  ‘Merde!’ said Jacques. ‘Now what?’

  What indeed? I was not frightened. I was tired and hot. My arms ached, my knees sagged, my tongue felt like leather, and my temples throbbed. But this was not frightening. It was too like a B-movie to be frightening. I began to count the flecks of millet-chaff embedded in the mud-plaster wall . . .

  I remembered the morning, five years earlier, my first morning in Dahomey, under the tall trees in Parakou. I’d had a rough night, coming down from the desert in the back of a crowded truck, and at breakfast-time, at the café-routier, I’d asked the waiter what there was to see in town.