Текст книги "Kruger's Alp"

Автор книги: Christopher Hope

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Текущая страница: 12 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

CHAPTER 11

On the non-stop flight to London Blanchaille sat beside Mr Mal who explained that he was a fleeing Asian. Blanchaille said he thought that Asians had stopped fleeing Africa, but Mr Mal replied that Africa was still full of fleeing Asians, if only you looked around you. Mr Mal had fled from Uganda to Tanzania, from Tanzania to South Africa, and he was now fleeing to Bradford. He spoke of Bradford in the terms of wonder American immigrants must once have used about California. In his opinion the Asians were the Jews of Africa. It was amazing, Blanchaille thought, just how many people claimed to be the Jews of Africa. President Bubé in a celebrated speech claimed that distinction for the Afrikaner; Bishop Blashford was not above claiming it for harassed Catholics in the days when they were often persecuted by the Calvinists as ‘the Roman danger’. President Bubé issued a statement declaring that the Catholics could pretend to be Jews or Methodists or Scientologists for all he cared, but while subversives threatened the country under the cloak of religion, he would show no mercy… (this a reference to the flight of Magdalena dressed as a nun). Let them go around in prayer shawls and yarmulkas if they liked, the security forces would root them out. Newspapers discussed this animatedly. CAMPS FOR CATHOLICS? the headlines wondered excitedly, and BUBÉ PLANS POGROM? What did the real Jews of Africa call themselves – with so many people competing for the title?

There was a large party of deaf-mutes travelling on the plane, pleasant young people who seemed quite unaffected by their disability. Blanchaille watched a young man in blue jeans and a red shirt carrying out an animated conversation with his girlfriend. He was a walking picture show. He held his nose, pulled his ears and seemed able to rub his stomach and pat his head simultaneously. He also did impressions: a boxing referee counting his man out, the drunk in the bar thumping his chest angrily, he opened bottles, he snatched a hundred invisible midges out of the air, hitched a ride, sent semaphore signals across the cabin. His fingers, his hands, his busy silent tongue that lapped against his open lips were altogether an eloquent and loquacious display. His hands and fingers flew, pecked and parroted, swam in the air, signalled, sang, played the old game of scissors, paper and stone. They were an excited aviary those flying hands, moving hieroglyphics, they signalled the meanings which words, if they had tongues of their own, would picture to themselves. His girl appeared to listen to him with her nose. Frequently her eyes applauded. He almost envied them their ability to talk so openly without fear of being overheard. He wished he knew why he had been routed through London. Beside him Mr Mal dozed, and cried out in his sleep of the pleasures of exotic Bradford.

Nothing prepared Blanchaille for the shock of finding her waiting at the barrier.

She took his trolley from him despite his protests and led him through the automatic glass doors into the thin uncertain sunshine of the English spring. He gazed at her, the thick blonde hair was pulled behind the pretty ears and expensively waved. Her perfume enveloped him in waves of warm musk. Magdalena looked chic and well cared for. He watched her small, square, capable, deft hands on the steering wheel. He couldn’t believe he was sitting beside her again.

‘This is kind, Magdalena. But not necessary, really.’

‘Not kind or necessary. Blanchie, it is absolutely essential!’

He sat back in the car and watched the huge clouds passing low overhead like enormous aircraft showing their massive bellies. The sky in England seemed very low. That was his only observation to date. Magdalena had hugged him mightily and noted his weight increase. ‘Too much beer,’ she said affectionately.

In the old days Father Lynch had remarked on the abundance of Magdalena’s affections. She resembled her biblical namesake, he said, and much would be forgiven her for she loved much, or more accurately she loved many. That was true. The altar boys had heard of Magdalena’s powers as one hears of a wonderful cave of diamonds from which everyone is free to help themselves; of a hill of cash; a love goddess one dreamed of, panted after and never expected to get and who suddenly announced she was giving away the lot, for the asking.

Van Vuuren had announced the miracle: ‘There’s a girl called Magdalena. She gives.’

‘How much?’

‘Everything.’

It seemed inconceivable, a colossal lie. One could not accept the alarming hugeness of this claim. How much did she give? And what exactly did that wild generalisation mean? Did she pet? Did she French kiss? Did she allow her bra to be removed? Was it possible to go any, well, further?

‘Piss off,’ said Van Vuuren. ‘You’re an unbelieving lot. I said the lot. I mean the lot. Everything.’

‘How do you know?’

‘How do you think?’

‘You didn’t? Just like that.’

‘We don’t believe you.’

‘I don’t care. But you can try for yourselves.’

And they did. Zandrotti first, followed by Ferreira and both returned glowing from the encounter, enchanted and absolutely converted, aflame with new faith and zeal. In her arms they had passed from uncertainty to deep belief. She was a miracle, a blessing! Kipsel confirmed, and Van Vuuren looked knowing, the veteran. Blanchaille held out in his scepticism. His unbelief was of Augustinian proportions and he prayed that it be strengthened with each fresh report of his friends’ success, with Zandrotti’s tears, always emotional, in recalling how amazingly easy it had been, she had been. She had just opened up and took him in and there he was, doing it like he’d been doing it all his life.

‘What – without precautions?’

‘Sure. When are you going to do it, Blanchie?’

‘Soon.’

‘How soon?’

‘Just soon.’

‘You’re chicken.’

‘No, I’m not. Look, all right, it happened with you but it doesn’t necessarily follow that it will happen with me.’

And it did seem to him too fast and too far. Too implausible. Sexual intercourse was something that clearly required longterm planning, something worked up towards, a large project studied in the old Chambers’s Encyclopedia of 1931 which he found in the hostel library and which dwelt in detail on the fertility rites of remote tribes in New Guinea. Not something you nipped in for on a Saturday afternoon. But it was for Saturday afternoon that it had been arranged and he was to be driven there by Van Vuuren, Zandrotti, Kipsel and Ferreira, in Van Vuuren’s brother’s bottle-green MG. It occurred to him that they feared that unless they took him there themselves he might not go, he might just say he’d been… He denied it vehemently but knew it could well have been true.

To Blanchaille’s horror Magdalena’s parents were at home, something which deterred his grinning sponsors who began a swift retreat and left him with the miracle herself, a broad-shouldered, solid, commanding, shapely girl with a mature manner and a shrewd assessing look in her blue-grey eyes. Backing out with embarrassed grins his friends mumbled shamelessly about ‘getting home’, probably regarding the afternoon as lost. Suddenly the parents also left, claiming with what Blanchaille considered false sincerity that they’d remembered an urgent appointment at the bowls club. Blanchaille was contorted with shame and rage; could the parents of the easiest girl in town play bowls? Surely they knew why he was there and were not going to allow it? Could they remain slumped in deck chairs over their brandies after playing a couple of taxing lengths on the green without a care in the world about what their daughter was doing with her young friend?

Obviously they could.

Magdalena had sized him up with a practised eye. Blanchaille thrust his hands into the pockets of his grey raincoat which he had worn, not against the weather, but simply because it hid the frightful khaki shorts all the hostel boys were made to wear. What happened next was a blur. She did not ask him to sit down (speed was always her strength), she crossed the room, kissed him hard, so hard she lifted him off his heels. In his confusion he thanked her but she did not seem to require thanks. Indeed, seeming to regard all conversational niceties as superfluous she pushed him down onto the sofa and attempted to spread him out. The fear of her parents returned. His own unpreparedness plus some foolish juvenile desire to preserve at least a vestige of the romantic formality made Blanchaille resist her advance, bracing his legs, refusing to straighten the knees. Magdalena left off pushing and went to the heart of the matter by loosening his belt, lifting his shirt, easing him, fingering him, making him ready. All this with the one hand while the other, on his chest, pinned him firmly to the sofa and then directing his hands beneath her skirt, obliging him to lower her pants, wriggling expertly as she sloughed them off and planted herself upon him. Blanchaille attempted to say something but his tongue had thickened in his mouth and all that came out was a low gurgle. He thought afterwards that perhaps what he’d meant to say was something like: ‘Shouldn’t we at least close the curtains?’ But the moment was gone, passed before he knew it. She moved once, twice, three times and Blanchaille was afloat in that warm sea he’d just entered.

And just as suddenly cast ashore. Someone who has invested so much reading time in such concepts as ‘ejaculation’ cannot but expect far more. But to have come and gone before one knew it! Brief and involuntary. Behind almost before it began. Like a hiccup. ‘We might have been shaking hands.’

‘Hell, Blanchie, you’re a born romantic,’ Kipsel said.

And then some time later, once again, in Blashford’s other, unofficial garden.

What could one say of Magdalena? Everybody’s girlfriend once, twice, and then she took off like a rocket into the political firmament, out of reach of mere altar servers, numbering among her lovers such heavy figures as Buffy Lestrade the Hegelian radical lecturer, and no more contact was made until Kipsel rediscovered her and carried her off to blow up pylons in the veld. Afterwards the trial, the betrayal, and the extraordinary escape. Magdalena, the saboteur turned demure nun in her audacious dash for freedom from beneath the very nose of the Regime, became a legend.

Once in London she came to be rated amongst the six most dangerous enemies beyond the borders. Connected with the Azanian Liberation Front, romantically linked for a time with one of its leaders, Kaiser Zulu, she was branded a convinced and radical believer in the violent overthrow of the Regime. Rumours and legends constantly appeared in the press. Red Magda they called her. He remembered Magdalena’s mother had made an attempt to save her. She announced that she would go abroad and talk to her daughter, call on her to repent. Various well-wishers raised money. Her local bowling club of course, a building society, and several newspapers ran the campaign to raise money to send this brave mother to save her daughter from the clutches of a terror movement, notorious for its cruel atrocities throughout the southern sub-continent. The usual photographs of flyblown and swollen corpses of murdered nuns, frozen in typically blind poses of hopeless entreaty, were shown, the pathetic stumps of what had been arms and legs pushing against the concrete air. Those shockingly familiar pictures the newspapers so loved, of decaying remains pictured against the dusty landscape of Africa which seemed in a strange way to lend a curiously gentle, eerily inoffensive aspect to the once-human husk, as if the horror melted away amid these vast indifferent surroundings and the bones, the hide, the carcass spread-eagled in the veld like a lion kill, or a drought victim, was another of the necessary sights of Africa. Except these were holy remains. The papers said so. Sacred clay. Relics. Powerful muti. As those who killed them and those who photographed them knew, in Africa the only good nun was a dead nun.

Magdalena’s mother’s visit of redemption went badly wrong. She got on famously with Kaiser Zulu, who, she said, reminded her of her old cookboy, and she was pictured singing choruses of ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’ in some tourist nightspot and told reporters, on her return, that her daughter wasn’t as black as she had been painted. Angry letters filled the newspapers from readers demanding their money back.

RED MAGDA’S MOTHER DUPED! the headlines yelled.

The sunshine lay shyly on the grey-green fields beside the motorway. Blanchaille’s first glimpse of England showed it to be small and tightly woven. The fields fenced everything within view. Nothing out of eyeshot, everywhere contained, ordered, bounded. The jumble of houses to left and right, three small factories, a smudge of development eating away the green and then the countryside spluttering out in a last fling of parks and trees as the houses began in earnest, but still, even to Blanchaille’s untrained eye, recognisably houses, double storeys, detached, heavily planted in muddy yards, in the strange green smallness of the countryside.

Magdalena drove well, fast, her small, pretty hands in speckled yellow gloves calm on the wheel. The road swept upwards and ran as an elevated motorway into the solid, metalled city with its row upon row of semi-detached dwellings. It struck the stranger, the sandy tongued foreigner, blinking with lack of sleep, this sudden mass of building. It asserted itself, this solid, glued immobility of London, everywhere packed, joined, touching, far fewer single houses now and these were bulge-fronted, pebble-dashed, red tiled roofs. And then blocks of them, stuck solid, identical, joined irretrievably and running on for streets seemingly without end. He shivered. Magdalena must have seen this for she smiled.

‘You thin-blooded African creatures, travelling north without coats. You could freeze to death here. Even in summer.’

‘I brought nothing, nothing except what I stand up in.’

‘You’re unprepared then, in many ways. I’m glad to see you, Blanchie. But I have to tell you I really don’t know what you’re doing here. Your clerical career was both wild and original. You upset the Church, your friends, the Regime and you did it damn well. We all depended on you, watching from here. You were useful there. I’m afraid you may be at a bit of a loss here.’ She lit a cigarette, the grey smoke blurred and clung to the furry coat she wore. She smiled, perhaps to soften the force of her remarks and showed sharp white teeth, but when he protested he had not come ‘here’ in any sense but was merely passing through he was cut short by a growl of displeasure.

‘This place is hell. I can’t tell you what I’ve been through. People told me I was lucky to have missed the balance of payments crisis. They say that was worse. The English are a strange race, obsessed with economics and they seldom bath. You’ve no idea how I suffered when I first arrived. When I came the country was governed by a series of pressure groups who went around shrieking at one another about incomprehensible causes. The daily obsession of the country was the value of the pound. “Pound up a penny” the headlines screamed, day after day. “Pound down a half penny!” Nothing else counted. Nowhere else featured. Wild rumours swept the land. I remember going to the opera when suddenly through the stalls and around the banks of boxes ran the whisper: “Pound lost three points against the dollar!” Pandemonium! Strong men tore their hair, women swooned. And given the lack of washing facilities, to which I’ve already referred, you can imagine what a malodorous demoralised crowd they were. Like an elderly woman with a guilty past they are beset by their desire to confess, on the one hand, and deny it all, on the other. They regret, repent and deplore all they’ve been, never realising that it’s only their past that makes them worth knowing.’

She lived in Sealion Mansions off Old Marylebone Road. A squat, solid, peeling green-painted block smelling of wax, dust and the sea. From the fishmonger’s opposite there drifted an aroma, a cocktail of brine, shell and sand wafting across the street. A corridor of fragrance crossed the road between fishmonger’s and entrance foyer along which the sea tang drifted from the boxes of silver fish, wide-eyed in their beds of crushed ice.

Also staring up at the flat were two men in raincoats. The sky was clear.

Magdalena’s flat was luxurious but small. A little entrance hall, a sitting-room, a bathroom, bedroom and kitchen. The bedroom was done in apricot silk.

‘You’re looking for a shining city on a hill, a sort of heaven, but you won’t find it, Blanchie. Not here, at any rate.’

‘I’m not looking here.’

Then why stop over?’

‘I tell you, I don’t know.’

He admired her bedroom. She seemed pleased. It was her lair, she said. An odd term. Above the circular bed hung a large painting in which two opposing forces shaped like tattered kites clashed violently. Red and black, two antagonistic whirlpools, fighting cocks, shredded and bloody, whirling and tearing at each other. Or perhaps two circular saws meeting tooth-on and the very sounds of their grinding collision were reflected in the shards of green and yellow paint with which the outer edges of the canvas were pierced.

She made him scrambled eggs and she ordered him to sleep in the large circular bed. He awoke in the late afternoon with the soft grey light in the room and found her above him, straddling him, naked. Her hand on his chest pinned him on the bed.

‘Stay. Don’t go on.’

Stay where? What did she mean? Sleepily he asked for an explanation but she drew him up into her and then fell to work from above, deftly rolling him from side to side and so their love-making began. Or not love-making really, but a struggle of sorts, without words, hot and desperate. She darting her head down to kiss him, his temple, foot, hand, sharp stinging kisses and he responding, no not responding but retaliating, giving little nips to lobes and elbows so that she squealed when she came, her hands gripping his buttocks and ramming herself home again and again, long after it was over. And still she would not release him and it was to be done again, their pubic bones jarred like shunting engines. He was bruised now. How hard she was down there, how rough! But she forced him over and over until he came at last, briefly, again, hopelessly, quite exhausted now, lying with his face in her neck and beginning to feel the pain in his back. She must have scratched him, the sweat ran into the score marks her nails had made and stung, but still she did not let up and since he was now past any sort of movement, slid from him, came out sideways, sliding, lubricated with sweat and turned him over now, mounted, reared up, placing precisely the lip of her vagina against his coccyx, rubbed herself there, scouring, grinding herself until she came to her climax, her breath hoarse in his ear.

He did not hear her leave. Perhaps he slept, briefly, or even passed out, but when he at last left the bed to look for her she’d gone.

He sat in the bathroom, his penis still achingly firm, throbbing to his heartbeat. The cool porcelain of the bath edge cooled him and he tried to relax, to clear his mind, to will the thing to fall and droop, an old seminary trick this. It had been an attack, a series of attacks. But why should she attack him? She had always had rough and ready ways, he remembered this from as far back as their first love-making. But this was an attack. Mounted attack, yes. There had been something angry, desperate, despairing in their encounter. And there was the speed with which it had happened. Almost a rush.

He tried to clear his mind. In the seminary there were tricks taught by the Monitor for Moral Instruction, Father Pauw. He had yellow teeth and green eyes and what he called a prodigious working knowledge of the fleshly ills. His lecture ‘The young priest and the early morning erection – some observations’, was a classic of its kind. ‘You will find it,’ he said, ‘a common complaint amongst young men, particularly in the early days of their ministry, that the member has a mind of its own. You rise in the morning to find it’s risen before you, a curse, a weapon which it cannot use against others and so often seeks to stab its owner. To treat this, first evacuate the bladder, then pray. If unsuccessful, reach for the paddle, the purity paddle.’ This instrument was a piece of polished wood, rather like a miniature ping-pong bat. It was to be used often. It was indispensable. Seven sharp slaps put the flesh in its place, disarmed the enemy within.

He sat on the bath and took his red and angry throbbing weapon in his hand; his heart thumped in unison. Damn Magdalena! What the hell was she playing at?

He ran the bath and lay in the warm water. Threads of blood drifted by, fine ribbons and spirals floated in the water. The blood was real enough. How had she known he was coming? Why had she fallen on him so savagely? Where was she now?

When darkness fell and she had still not returned he dressed and went downstairs and across the road to the fishmongers where the two men in raincoats stared up at the building, waiting for him.