LITMIR.BIZ

       8

      I left Heike sleeping and took a taxi into the Jonquet at midnight. I found the L’ouistiti in front of the taxi rank to Parakou. The bar left you in no doubt as to its intentions. Even the name, to my ear, had a girlie mag, fluffy bra, stripper’s pout to it.

      The building’s plasterwork was as flaking and pitted as an old doxy’s make-up and, rather than redo it, they’d just slapped some blue paint on top – gloss, as if that would make it better. Now the paint had started coming off in dermatological skeins so that ‘scabby’ was not being unfair. The lighting, beyond the plastic strips of the fly curtain, was red and sore as if the room had been chafed raw. The girls standing in the rasping light, who weren’t hitting on customers yet, had their smiles up on the shelf with the bottles of grog. They were neither drinking nor smoking. They were talking amongst themselves but not chit-chat. It looked more medicinal than that.

      I’d hardly got my leg over the back of the moped when my arms were taken up by a girl on either side, so that trying to pay the driver left me in an Olympic wrestling hold requiring a knot expert. They bundled me towards the entrance. The bar was narrow and stretched a long way back and looked intestinal in the light, the few punters inside ulcerating against the walls.

      A sailor type was slumped across two high-backed wooden chairs, leaning on an elbow, his face sweating, his eyes tearful and his Adam’s apple working overtime swallowing bad memories. A girl had a hand in his pocket, massaging his wad. My two girls tried to steer me in there next to him but I sailed on past, heading to the back of the place where there was a big guy sitting on a high stool next to a door. He had to be stoned, the way he was sitting, both legs hanging off the stool, his body doubled over, an elbow on one knee and his head floating in his hand like a nodding dog. He straightened when I hove into his tunnel vision.

      ‘Charbonnier?’ I asked.

      The guy’s lids, heavier than obols, stayed at half mast, so I leaned in on him and gave it to him louder in his ear. He reached over to the door with the speed of a hog-filled anaconda and rapped on it twice, finishing with a flourish and a how-about-that look. I wouldn’t have minded giving him a how-about-this elbow in his what-the-hell mouth, but one of the girls had started work rubbing my already sore penis and I shrugged the two of them off.

      Inside there was a small-boned Beninois fellow with an accounts book and a calculator in front of him. He stuck a pen behind his ear and folded his arms.

      ‘Le blanc? Il est dedans?’ I asked.

      He nodded. All these guys had been to some French waiters’ school.

      ‘Je veux le voir,’ I said

      He leaned back and pressed a button on the wall, speedier than his friend. A door buzzed open. A pair of hands was sitting behind a desk. The hands, in a cone of light, were arranging a line of grass on three cigarette papers stuck together. The owner of the hands was in the dark and it took time to get used to the contrast and pick him out and when I did he still hadn’t adjusted the astonishment out of his face.

      ‘Hi, Jacques,’ I said, getting it quicker than usual.

      ‘What the fuck are you…?’

      ‘I got lucky,’ I said. ‘Want me to call you Michel now?’

      ‘Take a seat,’ he said, going back to his work. ‘I hope you smoke.’

      ‘I gave up.’

      ‘Tobacco?’ he asked. ‘There’s no tobacco in this.’

      He started to roll the monster spliff which was his bulkhead against a long night of Christ knows what nastiness he had raking through his brain. I took the seat in the hot room across from him, my back to an open netted window. The glow from the desk lamp picked up his thin face, a worn and sweating face that was lined in a way that meant he sneered a lot…probably at himself in the mirror of a morning if he could bear it. He’d lost most of his hair, apart from a few strands he’d combed over the creamy whiteness of his pate. He had a tan line across his forehead from wearing a hat, a Panama that was hanging on the wall behind him.

      While he finessed the joint I found my gaze locked on to a framed line drawing on the wall which I thought was a still life of a bowl of fruit, but on closer inspection proved to be an Oriental woman weighing a pair of huge balls and about to fellate an impossibly large cock.

      ‘That one gets the girls every time,’ he said.

      ‘On the first train out of here?’

      ‘You’d be surprised,’ he said, and licked the papers to his joint with a very red and glistening tongue that didn’t look as if it could mind its own business for very long. He smoothed off the spliff and put a twist in the end. He tore a strip off a Marlboro packet, roached it and sat back to admire the craftsmanship.

      ‘So what brings you to me, M. Medway?’

      ‘I thought we could have a chat about a mutual friend.’

      ‘Jean-Luc? No. I don’t talk about Jean-Luc. You think of something else.’

      The sweat stood out on his forehead and I felt my own runnelling down my spine.

      ‘It’s hot in here.’

      ‘The air con’s broken. It’s going to rain.’

      He lit the joint, puffing at it to get it going, and then took a huge drag and held it in for so long he squeaked. He let the smoke out slowly and repeated. His eyes glazed and his face softened to a concentrated luxuriousness.

      ‘You don’t happen to have any whisky?’

      He opened a cabinet, poured me a shot of something and handed over the glass.

      ‘If you want to talk, you have to smoke as well.’

      ‘Too paranoid?’ I said.

      He leaned over and bug-eyed me.

      ‘Who?’ he said, and smiled with as close to a good nature as he could get without borrowing a Ronald Reagan mask.

      ‘Maybe that stuff’s good for you,’ I said. ‘Smoothes you out. Stops your nerves jangling in your ears.’

      ‘In my ears?’ he asked, nicely stoned now.

      ‘Whatever.’

      ‘Smoke,’ he ordered, and held out the reefer.

      I took a tentative drag and didn’t cough my heels up. All the pollution I’d been breathing had taken the virginity off my lungs.

      ‘Enjoy,’

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