Scar Face Hat

William Fischer

2012-01-15T18:41:00.003+02:00

The old boys that told me stories when I was young, prefaced with “You wont want to listen to an old man” but I did though their advice, to “watch and wait” cannot be taken in youth when are things to do, money to make so as to attract women with whom one develops intense and meaningful relationships.

I did listen. About the job in Yemen: “Don’t apply for that unless you intend to go because they most likely will offer it to you.” I applied, I went, I learnt, rather quickly how ruthless and corrupt are the organs of the British state, or were in those days, those days of yore. I learnt the trade.

In Dar es Salaam I said no, I won’t, it is not my job, not what I am paid for. John, from behind his large and empty desk, on the fifth floor of the High Comm said: “You will. It can take time, I think not long, but however long, you will agree. The idea of a free Englishman is a myth”. True, I had accepted the job, would go on to get a mortgage on the strength of it.

He was very right, in those days of telex machines- the cough and sudden urgent chatter, provoking us to stare at the distantly controlled keys chattering, the message:

“After further consideration I advise you, strongly, that it would be in the best interests of the Crown and the best interests of yourself to do as these people tell you. Regards, Stuart.

“Well”, I said to John, "You were right". He said “You won’t see me again I have another posting”.

Yet what do you learn, what is it possible to learn? Not much.

I now know, I am told, I have seen the orange uniform snap, that William Fischer is a crook and was even then. As yet I do not know if Cathryn AlKannan is a knowing accomplice or simply the naive beneficiary of dodgy money. I have a view, that she is a very knowing crook, but that is a view leaned upon by the insult. Cathryn would look most fetching in an orange jumpsuit.

One lives the cards that are dealt or any other platitude we use for lifes fortunes and misadventures. My connection of Phil Winter, bristle mosutaches, the Crown Agent who sent me to Yemen, John Rundel, a very clean shaven kind of useless spy, William Fischer, a conman who could con because he had the momentary funds to widen the eyes, if it was those he widened in Cathryn Alkanaan, are my own elusive connections: my own sense. Cathryn is by this criteria a good enemy, Once a freind, close enough to cuddle, as the best enemies are, hard bitten, righteous, very hard to get. And of course, since this is a public fiction, and a story of spies, the Karlos is beyond AlKanaan, one step more. A enemy must be long in the making to quench the sense of guilt.

Bata (Kubwa) na Casa

2011-11-27T20:24:00.002+02:00

Those two liked to joke about the animals that they watch intensely, staring hard and silently and then teasing each other giving characteristics taken from the creatures they study. Casa, a turtle, whose given name is Muhsin, is so called because of his very big feet and splayed way of walking made more because he chooses shoes that are much bigger than his very big feet. Bata, duck in Kiswahili, had a different provenance. Batash they told me was the family name of a famous trading clan who Batashi may have once worked for, had a connection with or been adopted by. Batash is a broker, his success then and now based on his reputation for being good with money. Everyone trusts Batash for money, a necessary and rare attribute for a Zanzibari trader. “You are a casa” said Batash to Muhsin, “you are a bata” said Muhsin to Batash. Bata a diminutive form of Batash. His given name is Mohamed, but there are many so called in Zanzibar so it is good thus to have a familiar name. They had a name for me too, Basset, but that came from another source. Basset, a breed of dog, “sad and rather disappointed” which is how I look because of my down turned mouth and jowly features, but I liked the name because on optimistic days that description fits with my view of my history. Cathryn AlKanaan, the Piss Chippers wife, said always that my glass was half full, another wag, more perceptive, reading from a birthday card bought in a Sandwich shop, said the glass is not big enough.

Batashi was once a driver and very good at that. He could and can run at speed a foot or so from a wobbling bicycle, break through the gears, never has road kill, not even a chicken. He told me he did not like to kill any animal and though he made little of it preferred fruits, berries and roots to any meat and is very much adverse to consuming refined sugar. He told me that he gained his insight into the human condition from a time of working on ships, a common escape for Zanzibari boys. A character I mused from the novels of Joseph Conrad, who wrote of ships and spies.

Muhsin had trained to be a cook and was then the assistant cook at AlKanaan's huts but was not of family. His English is good and self taught. Muhsin is very discreet, very knowledgeable about other peoples business but not at all inclined to opine, approve or disapprove. He grins the best enigmatic cheshire I have ever seen. Bata na Casa discuss matters often under the mango tree at Darijani and come to secret conclusions/

Bata left driving and owned busses which he employed people to drive. The key to any business, so obvious but lost, it to have customers. Without paying customers there is no trade, with customers any other matter can be solved. I cannot do anything at all only arrange for things to be done. Batash sold his bus, sold another, by and by bought and sold without ever owning the wheels at all. One rainy day I borrowed a car from Batash, since by then I had become mzungu mchovu and thus had no shillings of my own. In the three hours I drove on favour Batash changed the car three times, he had bought and sold them all.

The arrival of mobile phones was the event that moved Batash from doing rather well to becoming quite rich. There was no need to meet, no need to see a face, just a conversation since Batash is good for money. All can be done under the mango tree in Darajani. Those sullen layabouts, his school mates are not so lazy, Batash employs them all. I said “You sell on the left ear and buy on the right ear”. Batash like me is left handed and our bond was helped by the mutual recognition of a secret society. The society of Batash is a growing one for in Zanzibar even the most honest is by necessity corrupt, even the most discreet has a version of their business known. Batash can trade with everyone and for sure there will be no record of any conversation. Bata Kubwa, in the tinted car, on the back of a vespa or appearing from one of the many entrances to Darijani. Sometimes and certainly on Friday now that he is older Batash goes to pray in the mosque.

Batash advised me to go home. Advice or not it was time to go home, to be broke in a country not your own is a sad state of affairs. It has taken over two years in my own country to become decently wealthy again. In this new business I too have not met my customers or my suppliers or anyone I do business with. I too do not exist.

On the park course my golfing partner drove the orb into the pond. Reload. I did the same. Come home, reload.

Gray Ladies

2011-10-11T23:02:00.003+02:00

I drove to the quiet house in the village near Oxford up the hill from the Cowly car assembly plant. The village where the grey ladies live, where the bridge evenings are dry though they are always tempte but never succumb to drink.

The paintings that came from the art gallery in Barcelona at a cost of nine thousand pounds were still unframed lent against the dining room wall. The teak table for twelve was half set and much polished. I have known that room used only once. Susan hosted a bridge evening for the ladies and one man plus me.

“Have you got any fags?”
I have.
“Do you still smoke?”

“Only when I see you”

Susan said “I have not had a fag since the last time you were here”

“I have some. Where shall we smoke? In the conservatory?

An equally expensive painting from the same art gallery is hanging on the conservatory wall.
It was the hot weather week of September 2011, so the conservatory in the cold house was just beyond pleasantly warm. Susan removed her long jumper, her trousers I could see filled her tightly and pleasantly. I am sure she noticed me looking

“Do you live here?”

“When I am England. Of course I do. It is my house. You know that.”

Susans accent had got a bit plumb.

How often are you in England.? You see me on Skype.

The next day we walked to Wheatley to buy food in the Coop supermarket there because she said there is none in the house. I bought two bottles of beer because there was none of that either. She bought some pasta:

“We can have pasta and cheese”

“It will be better with bacon”

We went to the aisles again.

“Have you wine?”
“Lots of wine”
“Good. I have not found it yet”
“I will put a bottle in the fridge”

On the way back a lorry, a crew and a land rover 110 were making a mess of moving a mobile home.

“There is a mobile home site down that track. My cleaning lady lives in a mobile home down there”
“You have a cleaning lady?
“She only comes when I am not in England”

The quiet house did look as if the cleaning lady had been yesterday, the washing up done but not put way.The crisp of the sheets the make of my bed in guest room looked like cleaning lady work.

“My cleaning lady and her husband once had a house but they sold it because they are spend thrifts and used up all their money”

Back at home Susan went to repose so as to fend off a migraine. I drank the two beers, smoked two cigarettes, poured with delighted defiance a good full glass of the wine now in the fridge. I was thus tongue loosened. The September sun, these clear blue skies, faded, the quiet house is soon cold.

Susan came, no glass, no water. I gave her a fag, she lit it with style, I took a draught. She had released let loose her hair, a mane of many blonds. I admired, I wondered, but she had told many times that she has had no lovers for many many years.

“There is quite a difference in what is on the audio and what you report that Lars said in the showers”

A touch lip puff. The as the smoke curled in the cooling air.

"So tell what Lars said in the bathroom."

I had reported it, written it verbatim as I remembered.

Susan is very professional, has been doing this stuff since she was twenty five, which, I distracted, note is twenty five years ago. It is what she does bored and fed up with it as she is. The Washerman has no pastimes either and in retirement is bored and lost.

“Golf is boring. I hate golf”

“I don’t find it boring- it is a pastime when there is a lot of time to pass”

I have had that conversation with both of them. Golf has no meaningful result.

I told her what Lars said. Sarah kept my gaze, as far as I could see the only recording device was her own listening. This soft persistent interrogation is the English style. She kept her eyes steady at mine, lips pursed tight enough to whiten.

Then.

“You got back to Hamburg at six thirty five, you left just after ten. That was not the scheme. Your contract said you leave on arrival. You did not. What did you do?”
“I had never been to Hamburg before, the trip had gone well, so I went to a pub”
“Did you drink?”

It was a pub, they sell drinks, I had money, I bought their products.

“Who did you talk to?”

No one. It was Hamburg, I don’t speak the lingo

“You stayed three hours in a bar and spoke to no on

Exactly. I can do that in the English pub I visit every day.

Susan said “Men can do that. You are a man who can do that”

She said “One more time, it is my job, tell me again, word by word, what Lars said in the shower”

I am a bit drunk now. I can see that. It is not that she wants to catch me out in a lie, I am paid to lie, but she does want to confirm that I am consistent, cupped or not.

Not that drunk, we went to play bridge, three rubbers with the grey ladies. There was coffee, tea, pineapple cake. The sugar, the charm, the deprivation swayed them. The bridge session was divided into two tables which were not changed between rubbers. One of these ladies would be working with Susan but I could not tell which one. All of them could spot the inconsistencies and bullshit which I laded on.

The day before.

“I have booked us to go to a lecture, in Oxford, the afternoon, on climate change and economics. Would you like to go?”

I would. We did, the lecture very well attended presented by Professor Hendry was interesting, a huge canvas, a paper he said that had been fifteen years in the writing. Professor Hendry said that “if the distribution changes the mathematical models on which economics is based do not apply.” Gosh now there is a thing.

After the lecture she said we can go to the pub if you like. I did like. Susan is the only person I know that can order a pint of tap water in a pub with out showing any sign of embarrassment. I ordered two pints of beer and one pit of tap water, I am more easily embarrassed and can drink two pints if needs must.

We looked for a table outside so we could have another fag. We were invited to join a bench for four occupied by two students just, they declared, in their first week of a postgraduate in environmental something. Susan told them of her interest in natural bee keeping.

One said, the wit of youth.

“Is this new love or old love”

Answer that Susan

Her silent steel stare provoked a “whoops, wrong question.” Sarah asks she does not answer. A job to do. I am fed up with it, but it is what I do. And no hobby or good works has fired that barren.

“We seek to resolve conflicts. But more, to see the conflicts that are inherent in the contract, because, Michael, these contracts are complex. We seek to avoid litigation”

As one would.

Odense Golf Club

2011-09-13T18:52:00.003+02:00

“Since you have developed such an aversion to airports I have arranged a lift from Sandwich to Hamburg.”

Is this a favour meriting a discount on my fee? I have never asked, it comes with the trade. It is true that airports make me angry, a lift from Herbert was a much better idea. At six in the morning, 11th June 2011 we set off from the Quay side car park Sandwich, Kent.

The car, a Mercedes glided away. I began to describe it predicting this account. It is lived in like my face, modern enough to have the necessary gadgets, a music system that picks every note, a sat nav that gave instructions in the most discreet German, a climatic control that made no noise but for the inaudible whoosh that silenced any outside noise. Once on the ferry to Ostende the sound of gulls, tannoy and sea made me say to self “concentrate Michael, this is not a film but a job”.

Back on the road the motorways made Europe, the Continent, appear as a lot of green fields. Herbert drove fast, each field a frame replaced by another. There was no sense of speed, it is a Mercedes, only the Sat Nav voice and the display with colours more gaudy than the outside reporting that we were ever nearer to Hamburg railway station. Were there borders? There were no places that we stopped other than for lunch at a restaurant five kilometres of the track where Herbert was, I gathered from the greetings, known as a customer. A little wine, some beetroot too.

I knew Herbert a little since he had visited Sandwich to play drums with a Dixie Jazz band, a fixture at the festival and a couple of times between. He has a mistress there who I know passing well since the rich retired meet often in the streets of any small town. We meet in walled gardens. During one or more such supper Herbert told me he had made a later fortune in floor coverings .

Herbert knew my story: a long time in Africa, once with HM Government, a hotel, Zanzibar, latterly English teaching and the publication of Kiswahili language primers.

It was understood that we neither of us would want to say more. That is easy for men, there is no need to fill the silence with questions. Herbert put Dixie on the car stereo, mostly recordings of the band where he brushed the drums. He remarked on the quality of the solos, occasionally swapped, with a touch of his thumb, to Duke Ellington. The fields gave way to suburbs and then, some relief, to town, until the Sat Nav voice said, in English, “You have arrived at Hamburg railway station.” We had been seven hours together, most pleasantly, with four questions each. Now we spoke again
“You live in Hamburg?”

“No Dusseldorf. I will go there now

“Quite a drive. Anyway thanks for the lift”
“It has been my pleasure

Standard lines, standard play, but still a long way out of his ordinary drive to Dusseldorf. I had no idea nor, I noticed inclination, to ask how the Washerman would know of Herbert.

At Hamburg station my hire car booking was all set, the booking clerk spoke English with a top marks for grammar, the sat nav was set in English. They did not ask me where I was going. I set the new destination: City Hotel, Odense, distance to destination 210.6 kilometres. “That won’t take long on the smooth roads of northern Europe”. Herbert had driven the meat of it.

And it did not take long, two hours and a bit, the light did not fade, there was no border that I noticed, and City Hotel, Odense had kept my reservation, (paid for in advance), had some parking, a beer for the room, which was of course exactly as such a room would be in any part of Europe that is inside the fence. That red passport, that anonymous and anodyne look of an old white man on a business trip made me a very comfortable part of the wallpaper. As the hotel room closed, the softest of clunks, I felt very relieved and for a second very happy that I had left Tanzania for the last time and jobs, few as they were, would be henceforth in Europe

“No one will notice you there. You will like that.”

The next morning Lars Smith was waiting when I arrived forty five minutes early of the tee time he had booked. It was our first, perhaps our last meeting, but anonymous as we are, any two old men meeting, recognition was immediate. Lars introduced himself and then his companion: “This is Magarethe” Twenty minutes of conversation, all of well told stories, much rehearsed less often played out.

“So what is your handicap?” I told him

“Mine is the same, so we will play match play, every hole a competition”

Lars went to the cloakroom eight minutes before we were timed to play. He left a simple Nokia on the table. It was switched of. My voice recorder is smaller but more obvious in its function.

"Crackerjack". There is still a relief when the first drive sets off somewhere high and forward. We played even up to the ninth, though I had the impression that Lars was playing a little inside himself. He gave me one that was too long, missed, by a few inches a couple he should have taken.

The notes said say the piece on the ninth hole. But the ninth is short at Odense so that could not be done. The first hitch? One never knows with the Washerman. I decided to leave it until the tenth: I like a decision every now and again

I won the ninth, so drove off the tenth. Lars hit very well to a yard of mine. That was very convenient. “This is the ninth hole" I said very clearly to the pocket my recorder was in. Lars, as obviously, had his Nokia in his hand as we walked together down the fairway. I said my lines, he said his. There were some variations- enough to justify the trip and the product. Once we had to send reports, but now, easier, just send the edited audio. But, simple as it is, it does not work. Secret as we are these mpg files exist, they can and will be copied. We have used this authenticity to make our lies more credible.

We were even at the seventeenth where my impression, (my conviction really) that Lars was playing a little inside himself was confirmed. His first putt was dead though I did not give it. On the eighteenth his approach shot was that of a practised amateur familiar with the lay of Odense Golf Club.

Back in the club house Lars said we will take a shower, be fresh for dinner and the ladies. In the shower once we were naked Lars turned the showers to full and then turned full on all the basin taps. I remembered suddenly the waves crashing the coral beneath the bar at Sazani Beach and the story teller saying nothing obscures the recorded voice better than the sound of moving water. Lars came naked from the cubicle, the shower jets hissed the steam rose- excellent changing rooms.

He said, the lines of a familiar play.
“We can talk privately here which is we presume way you have made this long journey”.

We did ebding with:
“And thanksfor the golf”

I felt some relief, some liberated feeling that I may have actually on this occasion.
Dressed, me in a tie, we went to meet the ladies. Margarethe introduced Birgitte. Our conversation for drinks and dinner was very relaxed. I had now private as well as professional reasons to go more easy on the wine that is my lonely habit. In the morning Birgitte calling from the shower, the accent I love:

“Get up Englishman and have breakfast with me. Then I must leave you, it is a working day in Denmark”

On the way to Hamburg, the car smooth, I wished for more jobs like these. Everything had gone very efficiently, pleasantly, it was all very Denmark. After dropping the car at Hamburg station, tempted to stay an extra night, I called in a café to send the now pointless audio tapes- I had edited them in the presence of Birgitte- and to check my account. The fee was already there- very nice, from Living English- very imaginative. I said out loud "It is all commercial now,thank god.”

The Piss Chipper, Internet Cronies, Charlatan

2011-06-04T15:06:00.005+02:00

May 2003

11th June 2009
You have singlely (sic) persisted in trying to undermine the chances of Sazani being developed and fortunately you have only been able to convince yourself and a few internet cronies of the value of your actions.
Mine and the other shareholders intentions are all for the best for the hotel, yours are for Mike Harrison. You are the chip pisser, you have pissed on your own chips, everyone else has salt vinegar and ketchup on theirs!

Cathy

24th May 2011
Dear Walter

William J. Fischer owns 50% of the shares in Sazani Beach hotel via a Cayman Island shell.

The first owners of the hotel were the parents of Cathryn AlKanaan. They took on the place when they visited for the wedding of their daughter intending to have a holiday home but were required to make it a hotel, a guest house, by the Zanzibar zoning rules. There are chalets attached to the original house on a very pretty plot which you can see on the internet.

I have never known how Cathryn came to know Fischer, her story that he rocked up when she was visiting and liked the charm is possibly a decent version of the facts. She marked him early as her preferred buyer. Cathryn is good at spotting marks.

He claims a residence in Palo Alto, California. A trust fund baby, his parents, he told me, made their fortune in scrap metal dismantling US battleships after the 1939-45 war. Fischer William, says he “attended university” but that was not his thing. In so much as he would talk of his business and give hints enough for me to get a lead. he had money in time share and new jerry builds in Florida, Costa Rica and perhaps scruffier bits of California than Palo Alto.

Fischer told me he was a philanthropist which is why he came to Africa. Africa needs to be saved. To pursue this he raised capital from, his words, very rich Californian divorcees and widows, who, spending all their time on keeping fit were interested in doing good, in Africa. I suspect, these cohorts were pleased to see their fortunes increasing in those times before the end of 2007.

The schemes that Fischer put money into seemed very mad, to place a side kick, David Gill, an Englishman in Dubai to seek out further funds, more mad. David, who ended up with 5% of the shares in Sazani Beach in lieu of wages told me that Fischer was adolescent, but, hey, David was placed in Dubai, no wages but an all found expense account hired to solicit funds. “It was a dream world.”

Sazani Beach was a mad scheme but one of the least bonkers. Cathryn was, still is, delighted to have this once rich fool ready to buy and put off other buyers. Fischer flush with cash, his widows, took on Cathryn valuation of $400,000, a very big premium, paid out for 55%, the balance given to his gopher, in “lieu of wages.” The money was transferred directly from an account based in California. They were very pleased.

Fischer’s scheme was to make the huts a posh bijou for his rich American cohorts. For that I told him you need more land, for the ancillary services. The land behind and adjacent for the hotel was all bush and Fischer put up another $75k for a hunk of that though the title was vested in an Tanzanian company, Bata Kubwa, set up by me for the purpose, to get around the local ownership rules. That price was a ridiculous premium as well.

As part of the deal Bata Kubwa, my vehicle, got 10% of the shares with a promise of 5% more. I would have preferred cash but there was none and equity was the bad but only other option.

It was Fischer who first told me of the term credit crunch: “Mike have you heard of the credit crunch.” It was the introduction to a rant, dope fed, on how he had seen it coming and got out into cash. I think all wish not fact. To me he is a charlatan, as once I called him to his face. He was very upset which makes me think the description is correct.

I was fired from the hotel by the other shareholders on the 31st December 2009, “the new management was coming 14th January.” I left, annoyed because I wanted to leave with the cash not now useless equity. No new management came, Fischer disappeared from view. Cathy may have contact but since she wrote to the authorities cancelling my resident permit we have never spoken since apart from one email sent on the 11th June 2009

There was a postscript since another hotel chain offered to buy the place. Fischer via Gill agreed but Cathy vetoed the scheme because she wanted to retain a share on behalf of her son.

27th May 2011

Dear Charlotte
I do think Cathryn AlKanaan or her vehicle, Sazani Associates is necessarily more corrupt that anyone else in the business.

It is the aid game, the poverty industry, to make money out of it requires some collusion otherwise the business model does not work and there is not enough for the mortgage and school fees.

Cathyrn is rather good at it. To get by in the game one has to set up a charity- there are various legal means of doing it but a limited guarantee company is the current most popular option. But that is the easy part, you then have to dream up some projects, those projects have to fit the trend, (leadership, youthful entrepreneurs, advocacy have been popular recently), then seek for people to fund the scheme. That is a chore too, proposals have to be written and these days donors who do not look too much must be discovered. In Cathryn’s case, and others I am sure, Comic Relief is the heaviest juiciest low hanging fruit and Cathryn has picked a ripe plum from those fools.

Since you are a charity, doing good, helping the poor, developing Africans you cannot declare a profit. But a profit has to be made otherwise no school fees, no mortgage, no junkets. So of course schemes are necessary. One has tame trustees, mutual favours are reciprocated, well meaning friends with sinecures in universities are a particularly good slice of buttered toast.

In that part of the poverty industry you sell your integrity. That is vulnerability, a sensitivity because deception is a necessity otherwise you are the toast.

Cathryn is not more corrupt than any of the others who ply the trade which she is successful in. My dislike of her is personal not because of how she makes her living. Poverty is a trade and there is a lot of money there if you know where to look. Cathryn has not made herself a millionaire from poverty- I know some who have- but, true, as you ask, I dislike her an awful lot.

Best regards

Mike

3rd June 2011

Mmmmm the days before the bottle got the best of you........

Cx

Cloves and Zinc

2011-05-25T18:02:00.002+02:00

Circa Zanzibar 1988

Mbarouk had said “Can you help us make more money from our cloves”

I have no idea, I will ask.

We can said the Agents, in the voice of Moule, the new Director, modern man, plucked from a successful career selling razor blades.

He knew a Greek who had experience of the Tanzanian sisal industry. Things progressed, meeting were arranged, a plan hatched involving future sales, credit limits and timely sales. It was for me, in those days, most mysterious and exciting. Zanzibar, closed and dark would be saved, I, at a tender age would have a part of it.

When first you come to Africa you know nothing of Africa. After two years you think you know something of the culture and will learn more. After five, some take longer, you understand you know nothing and never will. I stayed on and had fifteen years of learning nothing more but, say it now, there were some amusing moments.

The project progressed to such an extent that the Agents bankers came to Zanzibar to promote the scheme. Terry (the) Kettle, Michael Collyer and I, Michael Brian Harrison, met the Representatives of the Peoples Bank, at the banks head quarters facing a square in Shangani. Collyer, a banker then but ten years into a grey suit career that is maybe onward, made his logical pitch. The chief of the Peoples Bank explained that though the scheme Collyer had presented made some sense to him as a banker there were some political and cultural hurdles to be over come.

Collyer thought long, he rubbed his nose, he caressed his chin, he looked up and down, he sighed he said, po as you like

“If I were you I would get out of cloves sell your grandmother and move into zinc."

The Peoples man matched his contemplation and as I remember rubbed his nose, a cross culture gesture.

He said, at last,

“Harrison, you know us, could you translate that remark into Kiswahili”

I doubt given the time elapsed I will be hauled up under the Official Secrets Act. But to be sure do not make notes or remember anything of what you read here. After all I may have made it up.

London Rooms

2011-04-20T00:28:00.000+02:00

London, April 2011
18 Allfarthing Lane, London SW18 2PQ. Second floor. I turned off the lights and set off to Tanzania on March 5th 1985. I returned to these rooms on March 6th 2011.

The upper part of a Victorian, 1899, terrace, converted to three flats in 1981 by the property developer Graham Cox. It was on my bicycle route home from the Agents to the place in Wandsworth I shared with student friends. I chose the second floor flat; I had already a taste for attics.

These rooms are more than an attic. A split level, lots of space taken up with stairs lit by skylights. The bedroom and main room is big, a place to sleep and live looking out on the back gardens, not known from the street. The first and ground floor make the presentation to Allfarthing Lane, my rooms were hidden then as now. It is a starter flat said Graham Cox, you will sell it and move on. I thought not even then. My job as a civil servant gave me access to a mortgage loan, 95% of £28500. In some stressful times I had talked of selling it but I hung on, believing I would come home. The bed I bought as my first and only piece of furniture, now as then, as I return after twenty six years of Africa.

There is a large bedroom facing a back garden through a big sash window. On this level a bathroom which I rarely used prefering the more social ablutions available at my Club. The bed is the same reinforced pine that I had put there in 1985. There are more electic sockets now to power my modern collection of screens. On the upper level a kitchen, big enough to eat in with back garden facing window. I had modernised the kitchen several times in the intevening years so as to please the tenants and had a new version installed for my return. I prefered not to use the kitchen since the washing up is an irritation: I eat in the cafe thirty yards down the street. The lady who serves there said, "Hello, I have not seen you for a while- how long is it?

"Ten years" Well, who would believe it, time does fly. Your usual? Liver, bacon, greens and mushrooms.

On the same level a day room once more devoid of furniture as it was when I left. I am wating for the pieces, just three that had been made in Zanzibar from the wood of a redundant dhow. These three small tables had been in the bar that I had run at Sazani Beach Hotel. I was for a while well known as the host there.

The window, an attic eye, looks out to Allfarthing Lane. But from the street it is not apparent that there are rooms beyond the window. The flat is flooded with light from skylights on the passage way between the two levels and in the sitting room. There are no blinds, I have an aversion to curtains, darkness and light will come as London town decrees.

There is a loft.. In that space there are the clothes and books, the letters I left there in 1985. This dust has been untouched by the tenants that have come and gone in the years that I spent in Africa.

I was thirty two years old when I left and am fifty seven returning. the loves and lost love, the fortunes made and lost, until here I am as single and as broke as when I left. Holding my tackle I thought, well not quite so, the intervening years have paid off the mortgage.

And now the last stage of a life gone by fast enough. Looking around my empty London rooms, the sunlight making live memories of past sunlit days. Will there be any more events to intersperse with the memories? Perhaps there have been enough events.

The Royal Cinque Ports Golf Club, Sandwich, Kent

2011-02-13T20:02:00.018+02:00

Circa: February 2011

The Royal Cinque Ports, one of three on the links in Sandwich, adjacent to the Club, where "dogs and women" are not, so John Gould, 83, tells, blood eyed and slaver, "allowed in the club house." There are women that I know, albeit vaguely, who would find that view, offered privately a reason to phone up Plod. They do not take offense at the Royal Cinque Ports.

Lunch, Sunday. The links are bleak when the wind blows. It does, the carry long the rough unforgiving of a skewed drive, bunkers designed for the Open. There are no ponds, some dykes.

"Do you play golf"

I do

"Are you a member of a Club. A proper club"

I ignore him and stare. The tenure of this lunch is set.

I remark on the tattered edges and muddy colour of the flags, the Club and the Jack blowing on thier flagpole.

"I once ran a company that won the catering contract to provide lunch to the Dar es Salaam, Yacht Club. I was a member. The late Frank Jensen, once a Commordore said to me:

"We have seen off all the caterers we have had for the last thirty years and I am sure will see off you." He was right about that. Rene, who did the cooking, was sucessful in persuading the members to dally long with the waitresses. This upset the Commitee a lot. I can understand that.

Johnie Gould is not the late Gould, loathed as he is, says his partner of 27 years.

Gould went to pee, not easy at 83. At the top of the grand stairs a stumble, roll and smother could do. There may be no need of boots. He is reputed to be strong boned with a Rasputin reputation. I had come to have lunch with my girlfriend, a staunch member, not to be involved in unexplained death, but it would have been a kick for the good. Always think of the proximity of Plod.

Frank, a kind hearted man who had offered his flat in Spain to be base for our trip to Grenada is by profession a guard in maximum security prison for women in Norway. He told me most of them should not be there but because of their mental state. I was surprised, being English, that there could be such a prison in Norway.

"Birgitte, 22, as blond as your dreams. 15 years for doing for her grand father. A kick down the stairs, sat on his face u til he died, said, I gave it to him one more time"

Great line, the judge smiled?.

I do not approve of that kind of thing, or any type of sex or murder, though it is, all of it, understandable. There are some funerals that would be a real celebration. As I am sure will mine.

Wasp

2011-01-01T00:07:00.005+02:00

That azure in the windless mornings at the half tide. Slap of wave, the pervasive sea sound under the bank of coral rag on which are built the huts of Alkanaan’s place. We had dived Kichafi the reef out front which, in those days, I knew every contour. In March on Kichafi with the still clear prism the whole of the scene is seen from the first underwater breath. Eleven to eighteen metres so we had stayed long for the guests liked that and I would be more conscious of them having paid good money than a dive master aware of wages, lunch and safety.

Thus tired we were back on land, the mid morning sun hot, sticky, some shimmer. Did I see shimmer? Or was that wobbling something else, a sudden mistiming of the pump. Eline tided the dive place meticulously as she did. Sweden. I went to look at reception so as to sit in the shade, saying I can de-gas a bit, let the nitrogen leave me.

There is a natural beauty of the place on the spring half tide. I looked out at that view and said I must leave, it is lotus eating and I am addicted. The black wasp, with a hanging belly, quivering legs dropped from the roof, a quaver of wings and then a big sting originating in the back of my neck. These black killers frightened guests, even the owner AlKanaan who worried as mothers do for her children. They most often surveyed but they stung often enough to have stung me many times through those wasted years. They mostly stung, men who seeing the threat and feeling fear would flap at them, but I was used to them and like some pain to be sensation when love is barren.

I had noticed my reaction to the stings had been greater of late. There had been a rapid swelling and a loss of feeling in my arm the last two occasions. But this wasp, getting a pulsing blood vessel in the neck had hit the spot.

Within a minute the heart pump had become fast. The wobble in the view, the shimmer was not the brightness or the long predicted event. It was a result of awasp sting. I instructed myself as I had learnt in the many first aid courses we conducted: talk to oneself.

I walked, whilst I could, to Eline. “Be calm. Give clear and low sounding instructions, use the cycle of care”

“Elin” She looked up, I noted quizzical. “I need to get to the clinic very quickly, I would like you to come, I will be unable to drive, please ask Hilali to drive.” I was pleased to see her expression change to worried.

I stopped by my cave to put on some pants which even at the time I knew to be foolish but compulsory. I got in the car, the front seat. Hilali drove at his standard speed of less than ten clicks an hour. The clinic is a ten minute drive and quite often staffed. Along the road my sight went, not all blackness but as I remember whiteness, as in staring too long too close to the sun. My speech failed but I could hear clearly, Eline: “Hang on Mike, hang on, don’t go before we get there.” I shall endeavour though it has certainly become very difficult to breathe and that pump is not functioning well at all.

At the clinic I was able with help to get out of the car, be guided through the door, onto the examination couch which had the cool, sticky and sexual feel of what I have always called leatherette. I could not see, nor speak nor breathe, felt now the fear that I presume precedes death- not as intense as I had expected- but I could hear very well. I was surprised that hearing should keep going when all other sense failed.

The doctor was reassuringly matter of fact. “He is probably suffering from an anaphylactic shock. We will check his blood pressure”. It takes a while to check blood pressure, I dreamt whilst he set up the machine.

“50 over 25. That is very low. Very bad. We will set up a cortisone drip.” Bad, that is terrible. I noticed another pulse of fear. My mother will be very sceptical when she is told I was killed by a wasp.

The Doctor jabbed my torso with his finger. “See, he is flinching. He feels pain, That is because his organs are failing.” Then silence except for the very loud sound of three other people breathing. It would be very delicious ironic to hear one of them say “He’s gone.” I have heard nurses say that. But I heard instead the sound of the blood pressure pump and that long wait whilst the dial reached its zenith and fell. “See, 90 over 40. He is coming back.”

My sight came back suddenly, or I opened my eyes and could see. I took a while to risk speaking but I remember being pleased to notice that I was not trying to breathe. The pump still thumped, rocking my ribs but to better effect. At 120 over 70 I wanted the blood pressure to stop rising, maybe I could use wasp venom to keep the BP down.

The Doctor said “rest, and certainly no beer for at least 24 hours.” Back in the bar I was pole axed by the first gulp of Kili. These brushes with the reaper always leave me a feeling that I should be more pro active in seeking out my foes.

Fredrikstad, Norway

2010-12-09T19:06:00.004+02:00

Circa February 2009

“I know a place that we can go.”

She drove which was unusual for her on these cabin drives. We took no laptops and neither of us had in those days not so long ago devices which took up messages where ever we are. At Oslo airport I had bought four bottles of wine, the maximum allowed in duty free to last for a four day stay just south of the Norwegian town of Fredrikstad. Four bottles would barely last four hours in my social group in Sandwich, Kent.

Stopping off at two supermarkets we bought a stock of food to use in the cabin. We bought a lot, some to cook some ready to eat direct from the very secure Norwegian packing. We will be just two but we may not want or be able to cook on the stoves they have provided. There was cheese and bottled herring.

The map provided online and printed out was not clear at least to us and we crossed the bridge at Fredrikstad three times looking for the correct side of the fjord to be. It was to be south of the town; I think so, the map I checked later suggested south. The cabin was hard to find. We walked on paths of coarse sand and bare rock down to the beach, to where there was a bridge across the fjord. She looked carefully raising her head furrowing her brow, checking the numbers and look of the several deserted cabins against the bad black and white photograph and the address on the map. She looked hard, her rarely employed intense look, at a cabin by the beach. The key worked in a shabbier place on the hill giving a good view across the fjord from a slab of black rock. There was wind, cold air, sunshine, to be expected in Norway, February.

Across the sight line from the cabin there was a bigger place, a house, equipped for all year occupation. A sign advertised a business which after some pause she translated and the meaning being insignificant to my story I have since forgotten. This lapse in memory troubles me. A couple sat outside making the most of the winter sun. He black bearded, long hair, rather troll like, the woman dark haired, long, white arms and some muscle in her torso, rather troll like.

I waved at them.

“What do you think you are doing” she said, her blue eyes flashing anger, “Are you mad? You do not know them!”

After a pause, long for me, the man waved back but thankfully neither moved or glanced our way again.

“I expect they live here, even in the winter. They are not interested in watching you. They see a lot of city people come to stay in this and other cabins”

The guest book in the cabin had no entry written since October. But there was a letter to us, by name, hand written, dated the day before our arrival explaining how the place could work. She thought the cabin had not been left as clean as should be by Norwegian standards. I thought then about a hotel in Zanzibar on the beach at Nungwi. I thought of Mkokotoni harbour and the tea shop there. The same woman and I had met there as well and looked out to Tumbatu through the haze.

The second morning we scrambled on the black rock on the coast. The wind was strong, we took shelter by the faces and huddled in the crevices. We were warmed with walking. In the times between noon and the darkening she drove us to the coast, through a town and we stood on a bluff above the sea where pointed at the land beyond:

“Over there Basset is Sweden. That is Sweden.”

And then smiling she said “Idiot. you are an idiot Basset”

In 1998 two students from Uppsala university stayed at the place I ran in Mikocheni B, Dar es Salaam whilst they did the field research for their dissertation. They dedicated their dissertation to me, “our catcher in the rye” and the paper was lodged in the university library. Twenty one years later it was perhaps a flimsy excuse to make my first visit to Uppsala.

It was a time of poverty and though I stayed at the commended Hotel Fyrislund to keep up face there were no funds left for exploration. The meetings were barren, I waited and felt the sadness we all might feel from being stood up. I waited longer than was dignified. There began a foreboding borne out by subsequent events. My sadness and my irritation at the spoil of a visit twenty years expecting left me with no memory of Uppsala. I wiped it deciding that I would plan to visit again, in more cheerful times and on my own account. That time draws near as I write today.

Around Victoria both train and bus the taverns are used by people passing through, the staff busy, too busy to notice unless they are contracted. I get noticed too often. In such a tavern, the Shakespeare I met the Washerman to whom I was lamenting and being consoled.

“These things happen in life, Plans change.” That kind of stuf
Then “It is very unwise to accept an offer of sexual favours from a Swedish woman in Sweden"

“I have never accepted an invitation to bed from a Swedish woman, in Sweden or any where else”
That is all right then.

Stockholm

2010-10-03T21:14:00.001+02:00

Circa: August 2010

In the pub, during the dinner parties, I hear grumbles about the state of the infrastructure but to me, perhaps because of so many years living in Tanzania the modern stuff works pretty swish. This train whisked us all from the country side to the centre of the capital in less than an hour and once there it was a float through the home crowds to the bar she had suggested. A fish place. "I hope you will like it"

I still feel a rush when these jaunts come up. The same hope that something might happen that was there from the first Fridays out in London, stuffed with a week’s cash wages, in London 1978. Mostly nothing happened except the wages got spent on futile endeavours until that chance encounter one Saturday lunch time in Holland park. Was it by chance? I wonder in my more anxious moments whether any of these encounters these past thirty years have been by chance.

Waiting for the train my face tingled. The excitement made it seem that my skin had tightened and removed for a moment all my old jowly. The platform was crowded for the 17.25. The ticket is not cheap so the grumbles say. Who and why buys these expensive train tickets? I speculated on the exciting things that the other passengers might be off to do in town. “Town, lets meet in the town I like the buzz”

“I hope you like the place. It has a no booking policy and gets quite crowded. So if you get there first grab a table”

Do the other passengers know precisely what they are going to do?

I was on the way to meet someone to discuss something, part of a deal I know very little about except the part I have been employed to play. And not that much about my part either: “you can cope Michael? You look like the kind of chap who can cope. That is what your CV said. I am sure you will, just go for it. Use your experience, Can you cope?”

Would she know more? I expected her to have a smooth confidence to go with the public relations and marketing skills. These ladies are tough professionals. It does not imply that she knows more than her part.

I was ten minutes early. I carry the expectation of an Englishman meaning that I should be early. It is a time to compose, to be sure that in a crowded come and go eatery, in a capital I have not been to for quite some time there is no one there I recognise.

I looked, she may be early: she could be. I wondered foolishly if there would be a mutual recognition. She might be blond, in Stockholm. I will look the same as I have for many years, it has been a long time since I shaved off my moustache. "You have a lived in face. Its nice. Down mouthed and slightly disappointed like a Basset hound"

The head waiter, an Australian, asked me.

“ Two?”

“I am expecting someone. It will be two. But you never know. One can be stood up”.

“I should grab a table, we get pretty busy, have a beer, waiting will be cool. When are you expecting your companion?” In ten minutes.

I ordered a bottle of becks, a small expensive bottle which I could drink in a gulp.

The text comes:

“Just left the office I will be there in ten, get a table if you get there first”

Her professional competence I could never match not even in the heyday.

The mobile number was the same as she used for to arrange the meeting. An ordinary number used for social purposes which had been in my address book for more than three years. I had expected a new number and was annoyed with myself for carrying old baggage. There had been that reassuring phone call “Michael, everything we do is legal, don’t you ever you forget that, these days it is all commerce. You are home, safe. Enjoy life, don’t worry.”

At seven exactly she was there. I saw her peer in. I had, old habits turned in, head down a pate where once there were curls. She wore a woman’s work suit cut tight, no blond, but orange shoes.

“I have orange shoes, Amsterdam shoes. For Holland. How is Elena? You told me you have been in contact recently? Shall we have a drink, wine? White? I like red a lot these days but this is fish. A bottle? Let’s do it”

She made a fuss about the wine asking the waiter if she could try a glass. He agreed without demur. She chose the second. She asked if I like oysters- “I know you do. I do too but not the slimy green ones.” She asked the waiter about that too, he said our dozen would be as fresh and white as…..

She poured the first glass of wine, “Good to see you” her full lips shone as she set the glass down, communion wine, but the level in her glass did not diminish. A whole bottle just for me! Twenty minutes of talking, then food came; there would be no waiters for a while. The music noise had just been turned up, the time to hustle the customers through or allow for conversations that cannot be overheard. Her opener:

“You probably know a lot more about this business than I do….

Two weeks later the contract paid from a company identified by initials, registered in Oxford, with a deduction for National Insurance, (so my efforts to exist had been accepted), with no tax deductions and no employer PAYE reference. I was pleased about that. I smiled.

Two weeks later I went to Oxford to play bridge. I took the Oxford Tube from Notting Hill where a young posh student type carrying an umbrella asked me if I had a lighter for his raffishly held cigarette. I got off at the Park and Ride where I was greeted with a wave, “Great to see you” and driven to a house in a suburban street. Three ladies and I played eight hands and during this time I was given one and half glasses of wine. The bridge ended rather abruptly, “I think that is enough if you don’t mind”. We went quickly to “so nice to have met you” and looking for coats in the hallway. One of the ladies told me she was a widow and missed her grandchildren living in Australia. Another had two children at university, one starting this year. The other was my host.

We drove home to a bungalow near Oxford I have stayed overnight, to use a phrase of theirs, quite a few times. She says she owns it, she has always been there when I visit, but there are signs the place is never used except for this sort of over-night. The spare room is made up, but sparsely, there is washing up left in the sink, packet cheese in the fridge, but always in the hallway a wheeled travel bag, closed, already packed, so I supposed. I imagined a cleaning lady coming to set it up again once the cars has gone.

My bridge partner chats nicely in the car, a “what have you been up to” kind of chat. She wears a lot of layers, country style, and put another one on when we get home: “are you cold, I have not put the heating on”

“Would you like some tea or coffee?” I gruntled that they seem to have taken my declaration that I do not drink “as much these days” too much at face value.

I went to fish out the tea bag she had dumped ready to stew institution style in a cup fresh from the cupboard. A brandy in a giant goblet would have been better.

She made herself instant coffee. Her blond hair still kept long was tied back tightly. We stayed in the kitchen.

“My visa and passport are back so I have to go to Heathrow at eleven o clock tomorrow morning. So I need to drop you back at the Park and Ride by ten in the morning”

Ok. What do you say to that?

“How will you get to Heathrow?”

She ignored for a moment that stupid, unprofessional question.

“By taxi” A smile, a memory,

“So we do not have much time before it is time to sleep". She paused, her silence seemed a little weary, but more likely it was a moment for composure. "So tell me, now, from A to Z about your trip to Stockholm”

“Stockholm, a small town, is the capital of Sweden.” I began. She watched silent, bored perhaps, stifles a yawn. Her eyes are sharp, but straight at mine and she does not comment only listens. She has been thirty years in the poverty industry and can listen easily for two hours.

Moveable Assets

2010-09-04T18:20:00.002+02:00

England is a good place to retire. The countryside lifestyle is designed for it. There are a lot of retired or mostly retired people. It seemed to me that anyone over fifty is likely to be retired and in the town I drifted to I found easily a community where pensions, accumulated wealth, other bequests sustained them. The walled gardens, backyards, well-appointed clutter, carpeted toilets, discretely provided me a new ground to be. And a place to disappear and make a new story of the life I had led.

These retirees welcomed a new participant. The various book clubs, the committees, the golf days, the bridge, both day time activities are keen enough to have a new chap as long as the play is respectable. I fitted in, I read the books, suggested new ones, bid and played out my hands without disgrace, boffed my tee shots a reasonable way down the fairway, had a swing that that showed some previous pedigree. I met and was seen with the respectable ladies, was easily persuaded to be seen by one as a regular companion at large and at home. I created a story and stress tested it over dinner. In my rooms above I thought of answers.

In these communities there are questions, there is curiosity but it is not socially acceptable to probe. It is a place where privacy trumps curiosity, where mystery is more respectable and interesting then honesty. I am English they are English though the tension brought out a childhood speech impediment that makes me sound Boer when I try to correct it.

I have met more accomplished deflectors; I have known both diplomats and diplomatic people. But the pub questions are gentle, the answers accepted: I stayed in Africa for some time. I first went there working for a now defunct part of the colonial office. I have helped managed a few small companies, not always or even often successfully, ho hum.

I buy some pints, have the occasional expensive dinner in the chosen pub, demonstrate that my expansive fan of new plastic works. I added some eccentricity, an unexplained dislike of Wales became a tag.

Some questions I resisted.

“No, I have never married, no children.

“That you know of”.

“No, none” Look hard and straight, unblinking as I had rehearsed until the fool lowers his gaze. Wait silent for the surge of anger to subside. The subject is dropped made a matter of mumbles but not one to raise with me. “He can be prickly about certain things!” “He has his right to a bit of privacy.”

There are scores to settle but not here. Here is the place of refuge, retreat and schemes.

Stray Dogs

2009-09-29T23:54:00.003+02:00

Circa.1979. Shaykh Uhthman, Aden, Peoples Democratic Republic of South Yemen

The camp was a collection of porta cabins set up on the sand by a couple of of four story living blocks just out the suburb Shaykh Uthman one hour drive on the new tarmac to Aden airport. There were cabins for the CA team to sleep in and a Mess hall to eat and drink. They were there to supervise the construction of a road using a contractual system called force account. Jack Winton was the boss, civil engineer cynical corrupt, my first experience of that from an Englishman and a Crown Agents employee. His number two Brian, Welsh, very hail fellow who did the firing. The Lads, those who supervised the shuttering on the culverts, maintained the tippers, ran the graders were the usual crew of mishaps you saw then, in those places: jocks, taffs, Charlie from India, Bob Blackstone from New Zealand, who it was that taught me that a good grader operator can do a level to an accuracy of two millimetres. He told me other stuff too, about holidays in Thailand.

There was a high turnover so there were always leavings and new comings for the weekly flight. I would, once the bar shut, the lads drunk to bed, take the Land Rover down to the airport to meet the plane from London which landed at one in the morning. On the way the packs of stray dogs ran to the head lights, I slowed to dodge them.

I waited in the arrivals, my beginning of a life time of waiting at airports for nervous men to embark blinking and sweating in the winter clothes they had worn in England. No one who was not desperate took contracts in the PDRY in 1979. He stepped out, our new roads man, the only white man who had not gone through the diplomatic channels. His look around, "Has any one come to meet me?

“Hi, Harrison, Crown Agents, welcome to the PDRY. I am sure you are going to hate the place”

His bag loaded, the night air a piece cooler at three in the morning, more for me who had learnt not to wipe the sweat. On the new tarmac beyond Al Mansura where I had been told to keep a steady speed and not ever stop, the dog packs came again from the desert sand between the apartment blocks. This time I did not slow, saw them go below the lights and clunk beneath wheels. There were two packs seconds apart equally suicidal. The Land Rover rolled them well and at sixty clicks kept steady.

We arrived at the Mess, stepped in, “Want a beer” “Have you got a coke” “As you please, have you got the mail?” The new arrivals brought the mail. I would leave each man his letter by the place they sat at breakfast. There would be some without, others receiving their Dear John. My own came a month or two in: “Dear Mike, I expect you are waiting their in that bleak and lonely place wondering if I am sleeping with someone else. I have to tell you I am ” The bathos was amusing though I felt the slap of wet fish across my face. I was to discover that Sue Melling was not the first or by any means the best for that kind of wit.

My arrival gulped at his cola.

“You want to see your room?”

He said “Man, you are insane. Those dogs, did you not see the dogs?”

“Hey” said I “I am the sane one; it is the others who are crazy. You will meet them in the morning and understand me.”

It was a joke, if such it was, gone flat. I had put too much sincerity into the remark.

“Look” he said, more nervous, “Can you take me back to the airport”

The engine turned, the dead dogs were still on the road, I drove around the corpses, the guy was already tense enough. The sun was rising on my next return, the desert heat high. The crows were already deep into the dogs, the guts spilled to the tarmac and the smell strong sickly sweet and stained into my memory thirty years later

At breakfast Jack Winton asked eyebrows high forehead wrinkled “Did you fetch him” I did, “He left again, I dropped him back”. He gathered up his bacon, chewed, looking at me, always disconcerting, shrugged, got up, walked out. Brian said to the gathered navvies “Let’s go to work”

Basset

2009-09-22T00:29:00.006+02:00

In south east Kent, the country side, August 2009 there was that year sunshine every day. The town I retreated to Sandwich, genteel, secret, houses luxurious behind discreet walls. There were invitations to lunch in London and to Suffolk, to “spend a couple of days”. My company is now of the well retired, or well divorced, those who are discreet. I am home.

Back to the village were I was born. The country side, Nonington the place I spent a childhood a dull adolescence before I went to that sailor town. On leaving college in Portsmouth where my knees were taught to tremble behind the Wilshire Lamb, I drifted then to London, drove trucks for Andy Voyais Plumbing dropping new copper pipes direct from the builders merchants to the scrap merchants and then back again, all signed in and out as Prince Charles. One morning fine, September, as now thirty one years on, I changed my overalls for a suit in the back of the transit in St Peters St, went in the side door of 4 Milbank, and became a Civil Servant, an employee of the Crown Agents.

It was a pleasant job, I did not miss my Transit Van. Chris Wilson showed me how to fill in forms, introduced me to form design, John Pragnell, big in the church introduced me to pornography circulated through the Dip. “You won’t want that” said Jim, a pipe smoking senior, “You can get plenty of the real Drip round here at your age.” He was right about that, "let’s go down the pipes, at lunch time, it will only take tenn minutes". I was, even after college in Portsmouth surprised about that. It was all fun, sex drink, Government, until in 1978, or thereabouts, on behalf of the Crown Agents I went to the Peoples Democratic Republic of South Yemen.

I had spent beyond my means, the cpf had gotten high. Ted Saunders, the lover of my boss, Doris, a lady direct from Le Carre, said “If you apply for that job you will get it. You can regret it. If you go there you will never come back.” I stayed four months in Yemen, but Ted was right. Once gone I did not come back from seeing a life made of betrayal, brief love, disappointment, revenge and laughter. Cigarettes, wine and Basset. But hey, back home, here comes a tale: sex, murder, mayhem? That is what they like to hear.

After the PDRY, a country that no longer exists, came Mauritania, Guniea Conarkry, Cote D'Ivoire, Cameroon, then, one March morning in 1985 I set out to Dar es Salaam to be for one year the Crown Agents Representative in Tanzania. I was a very proud Basset that day.

In the great sadness of old age I remember that day of hope and opitimsism.

Coming home I visited family, mother, brother, sister, said hello, saw their children. I am a remote Uncle, remote since none of my love affairs have led to issue. A couple of terminations, "I am very keen to have a child but not with you". Julie had a lovely daughter later in life.

It has been a homecoming and a good bye. I recuperated, told them I must leave again since one comes home to die and say good bye and that is done. I set about the cashing up, the attendance at my mothers eightieth birthday, Christmas Day 2009. I could be a celeration and funeral farewell in th house my father built. I have outlived his life span by a year already. I planned then to set off on one last suicidal adventure with the last of my cash and life. It would be a good blog, there will be readers, for the murders, sex or mayhem?

Nyanza Lac

2009-08-09T17:39:00.004+02:00

Circa Burundi, 2008.

At the Tanzanian border we went first to the customs post to get the car across. I got out, left the kids in the car, “be good now”, said to the policeman we want to take this to Burundi. He asked after the Document, I said only got a photocopy, he looked up, in the eyes, as policemen do when making a decision. You had better see the boss, in there. I went back to the car, looks good I told Frank. Frank strolls, to the office of the boss. The boss was a Chagga too, no papers, we are just going to visit people in the villages between the borders.

At the Tanzanian passport control they said. “You can go there but you will soon come back. Those people like war a lot”

At the Burundi border control Jean-Claude and Baptiste were waiting. Jean Claude looked prosperous with his youthful skin and big proud tummy. He had the hooded eye lids and in that country the Judas mark of an international education. He spoke French, decent English and until he remembered that he should enough Kiswahili to understand us very well. Baptiste had done more sentry duty, less belly and quick moving eyes. They were pleased to see us. “We expected you last night. We had to spend the night in a guest house at the border”. Jean Claude told us he worked for the Ministry of Tourism and they were our hosts. Shelly asked me, as she does when she knows the answer: do you think they work for the Ministry of Tourism.

The border official was not at all sure about us. We had a nice collection of passports, British, Finnish, and two good Tanzanian. Shelly had one from Canada. “Canadian” I asked her “Where did you get that from” “Canada” she said, her twinkle eye. Jean Claude forced them a bit, used his belly. Frank said “They will trouble us on the way back”.

Jean Claude and Baptiste were to escort us. They had a Rav 4. They shot off. We slowed hard on the high way crowded with pedestrians not vehicles. Frank said “These people don’t move off the road for cars. They are used to war, they are not frightened of cars”.

A lazy wave, a flimsy barrier, but we stopped. The Official, said in French “Where are the papers for the car” Franks answered in Kiswahili “We do not have any papers” Shelly said, in English, ”We are the guests of the Ministry of Tourism”
The policeman asked, quite reasonably, how we managed to cross the border without any papers. “They let us” said Shelly. But Frank said “We can leave you a photocopy” I smoked cigarettes.

The policeman took an African solution. He waked away, we watched his perambulation, crossed the street , to the market, down the road, all the while he rubbed his tummy and then his bald head, and then his chin. “Just like you Mzee” said Shelly. Arriving back at his post he beckoned Frank. “Leave the photocopy, and you just go” Before we could do that Jean Claude came zooming back. The policeman was inclined to be irritated at this youthful arrogance, but that could wait for another day, better that higher authority had arrived. He gave Frank back the photocopy, best we be gone and have never been seen.

At the small town of Ngozi Jean Claude stopped again. He put a map on the bonnet on which he had traced a route with a blue ink pen. “We are late, we will not take the boat from Bujunbura, we will go directly to Nyanza Lac” Stabbing a finger at the map, “Take the route that I have marked.”

Frank said “We are to cross this whole country in an afternoon.”

Jean Claude and Baptiste shot off in their Rav 4, raising up the dust, sliding on the corners and ploughing through the pedestrians today all dressed for Sunday, as bright as the tomatoes, peas and yellow peppers they grew in their irrigated valleys. This country is war ravaged, the throngs of walkers looked to have done badly out of the killing, Jean Claude and Baptiste looked too prosperous. I took the view that they would sooner be escorted than be the escort.

Frank drove more carefully. “These people are used to war, they are not frightened of cars”. We found Jean Claude waiting for us at Gitega, once the capital of Burundi. He was impatient and fending off many a poor person seeking alms. “We must hurry.” He stabbed the map pointing out the towns still to pass: Rutana, Makamba, Muyange, then Nyanza Lac. “It is all lame from now on”. Jean Claude was pleased that there was a paved road,faster, Baptiste I saw did not do talking despite his good English, he did a lot of looking. He had told me that he studied for his degree in the Central African Republic.

Nyanza Lac, a beach side restaurant and bar, trestle tables, the white pre formed beach loungers I associated with French African places. I remembered then Guinea Conakry, and then the man from Iraq, who implausibly ran a fish processing plant in Nouadhibou, Mauritania. That was a long time ago, and this was not the time for memory or nostalgia.

The party had been going since noon, and now the shadows were lengthening the
lake looked dangerous and brown rippled in the hot wind. The hosting had been kept going awaiting our arrival. Shelly and I sat at the tables, smiled and charmed at the introductions, said thanks for the food and for me the very big beer. Shelly looked around, then at me, then around, I tried to look steady. Frank fussed with the car, the Finn with the camera and Hassan checked out the great beauty and sophistication of the women. My team were being very diligent, playing their professional part, though they were stilted. The place was unfamiliar, French, and they were not sure for what they should be watching.

“Monsieur Harrison”. I saw Shelly behind him, she turned to talk to Carmen but as she did she briefly shut both eyes, an extended blink.

The man,a Tutsi,had real grow big genes. He stood taller than me, wider and broader at the shoulder wearing the standard dress of a perfect Parisian suit. “So you made it. We had been getting nervous. I hear you drove across the whole country. That is dangerous” “It was ok, we brought some extra petrol”. He gave me the new numbers, just four digits, in French without preamble or hesitation. I told Shelly, good job it was only four otherwise I could not remember them.

The party closed around us, once the big man had stepped back Jean Claude appeared, “We must hurry, it is late, it will be dark, it is dangerous we must go in a convoy to Bujumbura, along the coast road.” “We are ready,” Frank said.

I do not know what town we stopped at, the map has none after Mugara, though my memory is of shanty and mud huts, roof sheeting, towns made in haste as they must be when war shifts populations. Between these places nervous soldiers in a variety of uniforms walked, their fingers on the trigger their lips around a bottle. The convoy went on, our escort soldiers in the back of the double cabin provided by the Ministry of Tourism harangued a way through the crowds.

We hung as close as we could to Jean Claude’s Rav 4 which we could just do with Frank driving rally. The convoy stopped, the crowd had become too dense to cut through, the soldiers climbed from their perch and began to cleave a way on foot. Jean Claude came to the window, he suddenly looked very sure and professional.

“We need to get petrol. I run out of money. Have you some dollars we can change”

Shelly gave the hundred dollar bill. The note was seen, Jean Claude, Shelly, Frank, went off to change the money followed by a horde of eager money changers all proffering enormous wads of money like paper. The crowd followed them. I counted thirty, held hard on the lap top case, got out, walked, lumbering like an old sick bear, to the petrol pump. A woman next to the attendant spoke the number code, just once, I set the case down by the pump, walked away, no looking, I could see Shelly coming back, her mouth tight. She told me “By the time we got to the pump the case was gone. I never saw it there or anyone pick it up.” If Shelly did not see anything when she was looking with expectation and a professional eye then that was good.

They filled the tanks, we set off, the convoy had long gone. Soon Jean Claude had gone too, so we drove on alone. “I think it worked Mzee” said Shelly “Since they are not protecting us any more”

I laughed at that. I felt relaxed again and once we were not in any convoy the crowd ignored us. We drove on in the dark, to Bujumbura, my first visit in sixteen years, arriving tired and easy the Hotel Club du Lac Tanganyika, where our rooms were waiting, one each. Frank and I showered fast, then sat by the pool smoking cigarettes and talking Kiswahili.

Dexistence

2009-07-30T22:07:00.005+02:00

Circa. Ramsgate, England 2009

Shelley said “A stupid word Mzee, you cannot say it either with your lisp and stammer”

Some juggling around accounts, the named and open ones left with enough to keep them open for a few months. I went to Dar es Salaam back to Zanzibar, five times in a week, the immigration man stopped asking for the passport I said I never carried. I paid some debts, made some new ones, left some part paid.

We ate lunch in a bar beyond the airport, a good buffet. “This is a good place to come in the evening, for nyama choma and that kind of stuff. It is not popular at lunch time”

I dropped off at the airport, “Safari njema”. There were four hours to wait and watch.

At passport control always a nervous moment even when I have a visa it was easy. The new passport scanned, not even a good hard look. In the departure lounge I looked for a good place to throw the mobile phone sim cards. They are easy to lose but very hard to effectively get rid of. I decided to wait.

He had said, so long ago “Never keep the phone sim cards. It is always too tempting to use them, to check for a last message, to feel bad about someone you did not say good bye too. But each and every mobile phone call or text will be traced to where it was made”

Through Dubai, a truly never sleeping airport. I do not even like the checks in transit there, but it is all suspicion and news paper reports, I have never had any trouble. At Heathrow the new passport worked fine, the boorish Border Guard did not pause in his conversation with the lady Border Guard in the next booth. The last three entries through Gatwick had been three stop and waits in a row.

In the little park by Embankment station I took out the carefully kept UK sim card and buried it in the flower beds there.

At the bank in Sandwich, Kent, I ordered a new cheque book. The lady looked at her screen.

“It says you ordered a cheque book in 2004 and have never used a single cheque”

“I will use one this time”

“I have ordered you another one. It will take four days to come. The old one is probably tucked away in a draw somewhere”

At Job Centre Plus, Ramsgate the Group Four security guard with the very tattooed neck informed me that “you are late for your appointment Mr Harrison”. As consequence I would now have the Job Seeking Assessment first and the Financial Assessment second, a reversal of normal procedure. I thanked them for this accommodation.

The job assessment office told me, after gentle questioning, that he had worked in the auto mobile manufacturing industry for thirty eight years had been self employed for five years and had been an employment counsellor in Job Centre Plus for one month. It had been a long and complicated process to get his present job.

He typed in my National Insurance Number, looked hard and long at his screen.

“Mr Harrison have you worked before?”

Yes

“There is nothing showing you see”

I have been abroad. For twenty five years.

He looked again. The form needs an entry to progress to the next box.

“If it is all right with you I will just write living abroad”

It is alright. We got on well, I was the first of his customers ever to have claimed any linguistic skills and we amicably agreed on some employment goals for me to pursue. I agreed to do three actions every two weeks in my search for a job.

Two hours later the cheerful young lady conducting the Financial Assessment looked hard at her screen and then at me.

“Have you got your National Insurance number.” I showed her again, she re-entered the number, same result.

“It is blank. You do not exist”

“Oh dear” I said.

“Have you got any ID, two pieces?”

I showed her my new passport and new driving licence. These are signs of a right to exist. A death certificate would have shown conclusively that I did not exist.

“You see I said I have been abroad. I have come primarily to re- establish my existence”

“You do not want to claim any benefits?”

No

“Do you have any savings, any assets” She looked very sincerely concerned. To exist requires the means to continue existing and I had no chance she thought of claiming any of the benefits on her list.

“Have you any dependants? A partner?” No, none of these.

It is ok, I do not need benefits at the moment.

She called over the supervisor.

“This gentleman has been working abroad, for twenty five years” she said looking at me with I thought some combination of fascination and scepticism.. “Shall we record his work on the form.” Turning to me “You have been a Company Director, I understand”

The supervisor was sharp and confident in her answer.

“Don’t write anything about this work because we cannot verify it”

This was a very good answer.

“Will you go of on your travels again?”

“If I get an existence, I might. Do you think I will?”

“ I hope so. I do not know. They will write to you”

In this the time of screens, it is not possible to just disappear and then come back saying you have been for a walk in the forest. To disappear one needs to exist and with an existence, a record of a meeting, a claim for benefit, there is existence. And with that there is the chance of alibis.

“Mr Harrison, is this your telephone number?” She read me the unregistered number for the sim card buried shallow in the little park near Embankment.

“Yes, it is”

Addicts

2009-07-18T09:56:00.003+02:00

Circa Zanzibar 2009

Shelley gave up the life, got back to England, found a new man, found a job, we lost contact as is best when things are going well. Rudi drifted too, we had no trades and he was better off in the card rooms and the dark places surrounding the casinos that by now were opening in all the African capitals. Frank had a decent garage in Kinondoni Biafra where with his elder brother Patrick they could tinker with engines and other bits of car.

I too knew it was time to go, cash up, I made the calculations of how long I thought the stash would last: a few years, maybe five, seven if I stretched it. The Chip Pissers wife had with the Amerikans money broken the kernel, without a base, accounts and permits we could not trade. She had been a friend but I knew always that friends were dangerous, had kept few and dropped them when I thought they were too close. That I had not got away from her earlier was, I mused, another sure sign that I am old and have lost my edge along with my spirit. A few years ago, ten, I would have rolled her blows too, I had rolled worse I thought remembering the Axeman.

In amongst this pondering I had noticed but not otherwise considered the increasing hostility of the addicts. I had stopped giving them money long ago. My left eye had failed, temporarily said the doctor “If you take the medicine. Do you have someone to help you put the drops in” He looked up at my silence. “You can administer yourself. It is necessary and you are strong”. This one eyed world left me more in my own mind as I walked streets of Zanzibar and so I no longer greeted the addicts either. That angered them more than the money.

In Foridhani in front of the Africa House where there the food stalls that cater to the tourists had migrated there are many addicts. I knew mostly to avoid the place but on that evening I had gone there to meet two young people, relatives of someone I once knew, a visitor at the hotel.

The guy who started the shouting was not an addict, they are too weak to start on their own, but a papasi, a dragon fly, the local name for a hustler. His English, his build, suggested that he came from Dar es Salaam. “I am only doing my job”. When I stood up he backed away and then came with an over arm punch which fell short. His second was better a round arm haymaker that got me good in the ribs. I went down, a bit winded, go up and his third go, a full strength kick nearly missed but I was to slow and the end of the boot got neatly into my left testicle. When I got up that time there were thirty addicts around, shouting and ready for the sport.

I was very glad of the plain clothes police officer who was suddenly there in front of the mob, showing his ID, I was not bothered if it was fake or not, I was never so pleased to be arrested. He held my hand and led me out of there, the papasi and the addicts returned to their night time.

At Malindi police station the arresting officer wrote on a scrap of paper, gave it to the officer in charge and then left. The reporting office read it and then continued to write in his ledger, whilst talking to a higher ranked policeman who avoided all acknowledgement of my presence. They were thinking. After fifteen minutes or so he read the report again and then said

“This report says you were beaten”

That’s true

“We appear to have arrested the wrong person”

“I don’t think so”

He looked up at me the same look as the eye doctor, then too his ledger.

“We will arrest the others in the morning”

“Don’t bother”

“You don’t want to bring a case”

“No”

Never say more than necessary in a police station.

The policeman smiled looking at his ledger. This no paying incident could be closed.

“Have you lost anything”

“No”

“Are you hurt”

“No

He wrote in his ledger, a Report of Incident. I signed without reading it, I cold not see the writing in that light with my one good eye.

I walked back along the sea front past the dark part in front of the Music Academy, smoking a cigarette, thinking of a big shot of Konyagi and water at home, my only type of current sustenance. The tide was half full, the clear water against the wall. It was more than twenty five years since I first walked that dark stretch. I felt a moment of elation, of humour, I spoke aloud, there was no one to hear:

“Read the runes Michael”.

How to Rob a Bank

2009-06-26T11:14:00.003+02:00

Circa Dar es Salaam 1997

The boys were very glum and looked at me with hope but little expectation. The boat was in the customs yard well guarded by representatives of the scavenging dogs. We could see it, all shiny and just the thing for a customs auction. The invoices were out but the practitioners of poverty would not pay us until they were ready, two weeks, maybe a month and begging them would only make those clerks grin with pleasure. Every day, every hour I should think, the port charges increased.

I asked around, we did a tally. Every one said "Hamna kabisa". Nothing at all. I thought and dismissed those thoughts. Michael you cannot do that. You can.

I said "We have three bread rolls and a fish. We will have to rob a bank"

The Arab girls made our deposit at the finance house, Savings and Finance, a good name for the purpose. Mr. Gopalkrishnan was pleased and enjoyed the flirtatious chat from behind the veils. I sat in the cashiers hall, a poky place, where the customers came quickly in and out making deposits and more importantly making big cash withdrawals. Mr. G was turning over his money without too much thought for systems.

On the day I arrived first and went without passing the cashier to the foreign exchange department in the upstairs office.

"I need to make a foreign transfer."

"If you have the money you can send it anywhere you want, just fill in the form and sign" He was a pasty looking clerk with money dirtied hands

I sat by the window, the street below was busy with commerce. The Arab Girl was coming now, skinny and frail unnoticed as she slipped with practiced ease through the jostling men whose hands reached out to grope but missed as she slid by like the striped fish I see under this water here. Her veils, which today covered all her face but for the cold dark eyes, were a flamboyant yellow. If you were looking for it that colour could pick her out in the densest crowd. I looked away from the window and concentrated on the form and the foreign exchange cashier looking at me. Was he suspicious? I took my time. He checked it, very slowly, held it up to the light, went out to check the balance in the account and said

"Its fine"

The telex machine chattered, the money flew. In the down stairs cashiers office the Arab girl had entered, they knew her by voice, sharp, a bit like a crow,

"I come from Mikey"

She filled a form , the cashier gave it hardly a glance, he had checked the balance but moments before. She took the cash. From the upstairs window I saw a flash of yellow passing through the streets, Indira Ghandi St, into an old unnoticed taxi.

"Thanks" I said "be seeing you around"

We had drawn our own money, that’s true, but we had drawn it twice, exactly double. Our fish had become two, our rolls had become six and there was just enough to do the thing.
At the dock Frank, Eddie, Patrick and the others waited. The taxi arrived, the Arab girl held out the package

'Patrick, chakua hapa, na fanya kazi yako haraka sana".
Sharp, orders, no movement of the veils.

Patrick is big, lumbering, sinister, bent as can be, a former employee he knew his way around the sd department once he had the lucre. Two hours later the boat slid out the gate, down Ocean Road, across Selander to beyond Tenki Mbovu to another yard that we controlled ourselves.

Back home Phil said

"How did you manage that. You did not really rob a bank surely"

I waited by the phone.

Mr.Gopalkrishnan's systems were poor or maybe he was just stunned for it was forty eight hours before he rang me, incandescent understandably. No greetings, no everlasting how are youse this morning, just:

"You bloody bastard respectable Englishman robbed the fucking bank"

"Gopal, old boy, I would not put it quite like that. I would call it a temporary unuathorised loan"

'I will put you in the jail" said Gopal.

And so he did but not for long and of that I have already written. The practitioners of poverty soon paid us and funds flowed again and the Arab girl went back to pay Gopal back his cash and the interest (he was very quick to add) and all was smiles again.

"You must sort out these systems Gopal" I said

The boys went about their business, the Arab girl changed the colour of her veils and I realised another hunk of me had been burnt out. Perhaps it was around then that the nightmares started. I felt guilty but justified.

"Some things in life are very unfortunate but necessary" I had said to Gopal by way of mitigation.

It is the time the fruit of the African almond tree is ripe. They are the favourite food of our bats that come in multitudes to feast each night. They zoom about the restaurant, the bar and under the trees, swooping low and high but never hitting anyone or anything, they are the very best of top gun bats. Popo. In the morning the debris of their feasting is left outside Room 7 and 8, and even more outside of 9 and 10.

Hilali does not like these bats, they leave a mess and if it was up to him he would chop down these almond trees.

Crossing Borders

2009-05-19T17:33:00.001+02:00

Forty clicks from Ngara, my estimation, since the way was rising, second gear grinding, they sent a text, a bleep in the silence that each evening stopped our chat as there was twilight:

“We are waiting at the border, when will you arrive.”

For me to be driving, Frankie resting, watching my gears, shading tired eyes, already that says a long day driving.

Frankie waited on my reply. Shelley spoke, all Birmingham, without a trace of her prison grown American accent.

“You know this place, mzee”

Sixteen years since I had been there. Kibanga.

“Those last twenty four kilometres can be bad lands. We shall try stay with the Sisters.”

The beer drinking Sisters of the Precious Blood. I should coco.

It is told that when it was known that Paul Kagame would surely take Kigali a million of the Hutu crossed in silent column across the bridge to Tanzania, walked ( marched, shuffled) to Ngara, a town of less than ten thousand, and set up camp, making it the second biggest population centre in Tanzania. They were declared to be all refugees, the events in Rwanda genocide, and Ngara promptly full with those who play their trade with refugees, became a place. Some years later the Tanzanian army marched them back, in silence once again, back across the bridge. Les Medicins, sulking a bit, decamped to Dafur, Sudan. Passing through Ngara Frank and Has T, pointed out the remnant camps.

“Look, kiembezi” Plastic buckets, old tents, cloth, women fattened, their men, their daughters where: fight on?

There are villages between the border posts of Tanzania and Burundi.

The Sister had set up their place during the time of the “kiembezi”, their main Church, she told me, “was over there, over the hill”, where they, the full time Sisters would go in the morning. Their place near Ngara is a good place, there is food and beer, I bought for all. The gravel crunches when cars arrive.

On the bed I put the computer, mobile phones in use (three), the phone chips, the keeps and those we would dispose, those for Frank, Shelly and I, the decoys for our fellow travellers. Frank had the spare phones, bought on the way. Like all old salts I wondered a moment if it was not easier before all this technology, but then, of course there were no traceable bank deposits and not the need for us.

I had said to Shelly, “cat and mouse, peasant and gamekeeper” got trapped into talking to Helen Finn about the difference between a pheasant and a peasant. Helen Finn was primed to say, at the border “We are going to a conference and have been invited”.

Morning bright it is fresh to the border. The fuel trucks waiting as they were sixteen years ago. Frank greeted those he knew, quite a few, they said “You are here”. We walked to the post, I said, “We want to cross the border” He said “ Have you the documents for that car”. “We have copies” “You need originals”. Did I raise an eyebrow, add an extra crease to my brow. Frank went inside the office. We agreed that we were just going to the villages between the border posts. At Immigration, our passports pristine, even Shelley, they said you can cross, but you will want soon to come back, these people there “wana penda vita sana”

Segerea

2008-09-07T09:37:00.005+02:00

When the small planes from Zanzibar approach Dar es Salaam city via the southern approach they pass by the airport over the Pugu Hills. Descending to four hundred metres in preparation for final approach they bank and turn and at the steepest bank looking from the left window, there you will see the orderly eye pleasing compound, with flowers neatly laid, prosperous farm stead attached, the courtyard full of people milling, that is Seregea Jail, magereza Seregea.

Hilali is the contact we have, he is family, a check bob araby boy rather dude, young to own a car, we presume he does business. George is the company, Swahili, good clothes more weight, the eyes and ears and probably the muscle. We go together in convoy to see the lawyer, his office is downtown in Raha Towers. The lawyer says he will be there in half an hour, but I doubt that because lawyers are in court at this hour. We wait in the reception of his office, his secretary has the stern style they learn, but she soon smiles at the banter. She is busy with her computer, I notice she keeps clicking her mouse. I go behind the screen, she is playing patience.

After an hour Hassan A. Mngoya of Mngoya and Company Advocates returns from court. He agrees we will go today, as soon as he has seen the queue of clients who have joined us in his reception room. I am pleased about that, it means that Gadafy is really paying for the lawyer and with the lawyer we are much more likely to get in on a non visiting day, much cheaper too. Another hour or so and we set off, for reasons known to Hilali passing through Kariakoo, Ilala, Tabata, all the most crowded parts of town. I suppose he wants to show his street knowledge and see if I can keep up amongst the dala dalas. I do, driving hard, I have been doing that much longer than he. We come out into the country again, taking the new tarmac roads which, seemingly randomly chosen amongst the many possible dirt tracks, have become the circuitous route to everywhere. We stop to buy khangas for Helens visit, short skirts and bare arms will not do for prison visits. The road bends round sharply and again, still tarmac as we leave the town to the hills, out of Tabata, the sign welcomes us to Seregea. In the priorotisation of funds for road building the road to the prison rates quite high

There is not much traffic. Seregea, like the other country prisons I have seen, is from the outside a picture of good order. There is only one other car in the park, a Discovery, another big prisoner who may be visited on a day where there are no official visits. The compound is set on a hill top with a good aspect to the forest remnants, some of the seven hundred species of birds said to have been seen by twitchers here are in song. There is a low chain link fence around set some fifty metres from the compound walls. The traffic bar is manned by a single guard. Outside some bandas for the guards to sit whilst taking lunch or beer in the evening, a vendor frying chips to serve them.

Wait. Hassan Mngoya walking, slightly stooped as tall men sometimes do in short doored societies, graying hair, not white just less black, to the compound door with the slow confidence of his profession. They enter prison confident of soon walking out. He will see what the Governor says, he thinks it will be difficult

Helen tells me she has butterflies. She has never been in a prison. The guards and prisoners around look sideways at her, not directly, that is not allowed, but the presence of a white woman amongst that entourage by the gate is an unusual but not unprecedented event, worthy of curiosity in a place of slow routine. The wait extends, Helen does not think it will be possible.

I say "You never know, but I don’t think he would have come if he did not think it possible. Not to have you disappointed by the gate

Mngoya is returning, walking to the traffic bar, he looks up he smiles, it is good, he gestures come
"Come" I say
"You are on" I take an arm to move her forward, Hilali, and George, follow.

From twenty metres Mngoya speaks

"Only one

"It will be Helen" I say to Hilali using the authority of age.

And to Helen, touching her forward by the elbow,

"Go now

There is the stillness of the afternoon. The gathering of wood and collecting of water pauses. If I were a painter or an author I would describe a scene from the theatre stage. To left groups of male prisoners in their orange uniforms with fetching darker circles, to right the lady inmates in their yellow dresses, bright as the birds, posed; still, with white smiles fixed. Mingling, keeping eye, lady guards so smartly turned out in their brown skirts and white epaulets, and male warders, brown trousers, brown shirts white lanyards. Through this set scene Helen, swathed in khangas of purple and white, walks slowly, on the arm of Mngoya, his grey suit, like a father at a wedding, down the wide sandy path, to the ornate gates of Seregea. They arrive at the chapel door in which a portal opens and Mngoya stoops and lead her through, the portal closes

Noses twitch, the silence and the spell is broken, the scene closed, by the sudden pungent unpleasant smell of lit cigar

Mikocheni "B"

2008-07-16T16:00:00.001+02:00

We ran a guest house there and a kind of club in a warehouse on the industrial estate to which, until the soft drink bottling plant was built, there was no real road. It was a place of theatre. There were big spaces, wooden offices built up on stilts in the centre and around the walls, sliding doors that could open or close parts of the cavern, making space or caves. The bright floodlights were rigged up by Eddie. There were lots of sturdy girders well studded with big rivets. We had chains, whips and canes, when asked I said, with some truth, the chains were for lifting vehicle engines, for we were a garage in the day time. The canes were to support the peas we grew in the rough grounds outside so as to feed our many spanner boys, the whips to chase off the goats who would eat our new pea sprouts.

On the ground floor at the house the restaurant served cracked crab in ginger, red snapper, mashed potato and fresh cucumber. It was rather formal with white table cloths and the discussion was usually about economics, development and other sober subjects. The second floor was darker, we played a video there, one hundred and forty nine nights in succession. It was entiltled Stop Making Sense by a band called Talking Heads. To play an video so often on a loop was a modern innovation in those distant times.

On the roof, the famous roof, there was poker, prawns, vodka, the stuff of illusion. The coloured girls served and really sang, d'do d'do. I played Walk on the Wild side and the clients stiffened. We did compromise, honey traps, mail set ups, always to order, mostly diplomats.

I think we stayed too long. There too many roles for me. The video played a song, "Life During Wartime" that caught my ear as I pounded the stairs between my floor and bed rooms. He sang, every night, "couple of passports, two or three visas. I have changed my hairstyle so many times I don't even know what I look like". In the club we spanked the waitresses.

You make enemies a plenty in that kind of trade. Every six weeks I was trucked off to jail, I met organs of the State I did not know existed. There were new contacts made in Keko and Sengerea jails. I complained to the Commissioner, maybe observed is better, that there was a lot of harassment. He was the landlord. We spoke in a container bar: plastic chairs set up by a converted container on any bit of open roadside, a place to meet where you, me, the container , the chairs could be gone in a moment. We often were gone in a moment, the girls still sung.

He said "Michael you should know this. My boys are the scavenging dogs. They come to your place looking for something to eat. Your job is to convince them there is nothing to eat. When you do they will look elsewhere. "

Cigarette, sunglasses, warm beer, big tummy. Being in the prisons came to be relaxation, Saturday afternoon beers in the courtyard.

The place flooded, there had been no rain for years but when those rains came it was apparent we were living in a swamp. There was a song on the video called Swamp as well. After we had gone the place in Mikocheni B was razed. Some of my several actors parts became famous, grew big in the retelling in the bordellos and parlours of Dar es Salaam.

Taut

2008-06-25T16:01:00.015+02:00

Shelly became worried about her parole. I said that if she kept out of Amerika then it should not make a difference. These Californian pops made here nervous, to her any of these characters was most likely a Federal Marshal, I think she is half likely right. These guys really get their rocks off by shackling. She slipped out to Oslo, planning to take a bus to a southern ferry, drive and take on offers through the flat lands of Denmark, make advantage of the summer ease, wait on in Copenhagen. She speaks decent Danish.

Rudi gets a lot of tic when their are women around and he is anyway a nervous German. This time of year, summer in the north lands, there come women to this beach wearing only swim wear. In the nervous he slid out one night, his ease the dark parts of Dar es Salaam, Kampala, these days he is known in Bujunbura. That town has calmed a bit since the April days of bodies on the streets and the Tutsi girls lured and offered.

Muhsin went to keep watch in Darijani, he is never spotted. The Duck to Hong Kong on his own purchasing mission.

Shelly had left her Ben-Wa balls. I kept them in my pocket, took and clicked them incessant perched alone in the beach bar. Click, click, click, juice. A man up in reception, short and fit, a Manchester accent. Have you rooms. Plenty. He insisted on paying advance dead president. We drunk beer, until eleven o clock.

"I was four years in the army, then four years in the RAF. I work in Afghanistan, civilian, aircraft handling logistics for NATO"

I stayed on. We drank together. He had a recording device in which there was an amplified loop of a rattles snake. We played it using the speakers left by Alex Howard. I sat upon the Ben-Wa balls.

Shelly had said " Keep them up your bottom. For me that is where the Marshall's like to look. When they find something there they leave the rest alone"

"You are quite a character. Always good to meet them. You don't like this Amerikan then.

I would quite like to go on a Safari"

I fixed the trip, three days in Ruaha, no single supplement. We drank red wine. He did not smoke. There is silence, the noisy tide would mostly drown a sniper shot. That is the Authors trade, Rudi is more a switch blade.

The blue pills and hospital grade sister were bought from the chemist off the market. Needle and thread from a pharmacy down Mobassa way.

Michael met Isobella Giles for lunch in the Spanish, Northcote Road, then two weeks later for, at her suggestion, "an early dinner" some place in Wimbledon Village, "where the food is always good", not so always in the Village. At the Spanish she wore blue jeans, the dinner a green frock, looked smart and trim in both. She arrived exactly on time, me three minutes early. She was assertive with both of the severveuse, the last an Australian manager. To taste the wine she leaned back in her chair, confident. At our train station parting, the first place the black cabs waited, she said

"It is so nice to re-connect"

Michael was not sure of the last stop on that bus route. I got off, wrong stop, got back on the going out door. Two uniformed policeman were on the bus. One said

"Sir, did you buy a ticket"

I showed my Oyster card, credited. The bus driver coughed, spat, guffawed.

"Get on a bus, get off a bus, get on get arrested"

"Sir that is something of an exaggeration"

"I think it best we end this conversation"

Got off at the next stop. By the gates of Wimbledon Lawn tennis club, painted, flags a flutter, parking restrictions newly yellowed, June mellow warmth in readiness for an annual tennis competition. A close moment on a bus, unexpected, that is how will probably end, a bit of bad luck a lapse of concentration. By the sword.

The Washerman.

On Wimbledon Common, wooded, a place of murders, women with dogs. His colliers run loose finding badger holes, we call his dogs. By the by one returns and locates the other two coming out a hole muddied with badger mulched earth.

It is a warm Sunday morning , early June, prior to lunch. His beard is flecked with frost, dry ice upper lip, white breath, Moscow in winter, nineteen seventy eight.

"Palo Alto was once a pretty pace, perhaps still is. Your room is in Redwood City"

Duck

2008-05-23T21:24:00.021+02:00

"What the fuck is Bata Kubwa". That was rude but he explained he was American and believed in direct speaking. I explained a version of the company called Big Duck. The eyes of the crew, all sultry murder, implied the old man was being old, soft and malleable.

"You know" he said, like they do in Westerns, a Tammy Lee Jones drawl, all fake since he had come that day from California ( one of their States).

I waited. The obvious answer was no I don't. But I was very sure he was ready to tell me. He needed a big breath for the big lie and the big threat. I savoured, committed to memory, watched the teleprinter write a few spontaneous, of the moment, versions of the moments a new enemy, a new obsession, was made. The crew had worried about him, his promises and platitudes, that I too would believe. They were pleased to see some new anger grow in babu

"You understand, Mike, that this means I own the place"

His eyes narrow, to give effect, Fischer drew rasping on his thin tobacco free joint. I looked back red eyed and silent, Muhsin split his sphinx face for a moment of grin, wide, and mirthless. Zanzibar has consumed for no return many a wiser man than this Amerikan.

We planned our leaving anyway. There had been an air of departure around. It was the building encroaching along our track, the failing of the messaging systems, the disquieting sense of being too well known in the bar. The greetings by name, the idea that we were of them. Shelly was always the most nevous, she prefered us to be moving always concerned about pursuit. She had spent ten years in the is Amerikans prison, had more reason than me to hate them, but fear overode. But even I was a moment frisson when a Norwegian woman said "I hear you are a white washer".

Shelly voiced what I think we had all been musing.

"Shall we make a mark of this Amerikan"

"Is there a difference between one Amerikan and another"

To themselves but I think not to us: they are their leader.

It is rare for me to be the voice of moderation in my crew, my band of outlaws. Most of them hope one day to have home comforts. But this time, they getting hot, I thought I should comfort them.

"They will come bearing lawyers"

But I doubt it will come to that. Their empire is collapsing, we are the ouposts, their first retreat, and this Fischer, was never their Ceasar, though he had a picture of himself as that. I did as well.

He would huff and puff though, whine and squawk, be encouraged by his nodding dogs.

Those Kind of People

2008-02-17T12:40:00.005+02:00

Catching glances at the sheli in Darijani we walked up Creek Road, in front of the market through the bus stop where the dala dala conductors lean or bang the tin, whilst drivers re. Inside the bus idlers make a crowd by pretending to be passengers. "Hey Babu", they mutter "Hey babu, Nungwi", they cry, the last u sound extended into a rising screech. We, (an American woman, call her Sara, with an American long "a" sound as in Bob Dylans wife), walk on by the stone faced Islam of the wholesalers stalls, before them open cartons containing boxes of soap, ships biscuit, sauce, that kind of thing suggesting falsely the gear they deal in.

I catch the eye of a date seller, "tendi,safi" reflecting my widened eyes with his own rounding. Black pupils lock and mirror mine.

"Why do they stare" , Sara says, hair, hippy style over her face. "

"We stare and avert" I say, "When there is some thing to look at they look: strong and fair".

At the entrance to the alley, the fruit and herb alley, the dried fish stink. I pick up a whole dried octopus,

"You like that stuff?" I like her accent.

Five strides down, where the ninja women bustle, on a little visited shelf I take a jar, an old produce jar re used, full now with house made pickled lemons.

She puckers a Californian nose, " are they clean? "

"In a hotel I ran, in another city, at first light, I watched a spindle legged man with spectacles trying to slip away. A woman appeared on the balcony, an accent American, like you. She called out-"if you cannot do better than a pickled walnut then next time I will sit on your head". The repost amused me, ever since I have had a taste for pickled fruits"

The pickled lemon seller said four thousand five hundred, I gave him three thousand, he nodded curtly, saying "Babu, badye

Down deep Darajani, the money changer who does any kind of transfer. In the outer office the windows did a busy trade. The tellers looked up, an eye brow raised a moment, my white skin, the locked door opened, I slip inside, closing discretely but as firmly as a cell. There is one more office, through the window I see the man, I am gestured in, fingers down. He is squint. I cannot tell which gaze is on me which one to meet. There are two land lines, big hand sets set to speaker, he holds one mobile two more lay on the desk. He converses on one of the speaker phones, hold one mobile to his right ear. The other phones ring constantly. The office is crowded with silent people, a tennis match is showing sound muted on an elevated screen. There should have been a gold fish bowl with one fish. I am given a small bottle of very iced water.

He stops his phone conversations though the phones still ring.

"Yes?"

We talk for a time, at his discretion, of people that we have both known or have agreed to mention.

"So"

I want to send money to Sweden. The pause, for reflection or the polite appearance of reflection.

"How will you pay"

"Cash, Amerikan"

"It will go through Dubai, arrive tomorrow, cost $50"

I had left Sara in Abduls shop. He sells us sheets and towels from his brothers factory in Pakistan. Abdul knew where I had been.

"Was that legal" says Sara.

I reply "I do not have the right kind of passport to go to Amerika"

So thus we passed on, first to the coffee house called Archipelago, then on north to the Bar, then to the rooms at Sazani. For once back to that beach none of these people can find me. Can they? Must be like sleeping with Jesse James.

Rinsing

2007-09-27T16:46:00.001+02:00

"Most of what we do now was perfectly legal not so long ago" Rudi was partial to expressing superfluous knowledge when he rolled his first fag. Once he has had a drink, he shuts up, gets alert, not much of how Rudi has made his living has been legal anytime lately. Maybe in Iraq it is legal.

"What Bella does is legal now. She does it for the Government" So once had I, but then that was a long legal time ago. I looked for Shelly looking at her wine, she looked up at Rudi, sideways, but she did not say a thing. Shelly is the only one of us who has done any significant time in prison and whether it was for something illegal outside of Amerika none of us, least of all Shelley would ever really know. only that the prosecutor was convincing in his manner. Rinsing is like that, legal here, not there, maybe so maybe not, we don't ask those kind of questions, can't afford to.

Was it clearer then? Maybe not, now I am in charge, then I did as instructed and we were not expected not did we want to ask questions. It was necessary to separate thing sin the mind, this was work, this is love, this is how to do the washing up. Women, it seems to me, are good at that, Bella, Shelley, the Author, which pretty much encompasses all the women I have known well enough to talk to. Watching Rude being pensive, Shelley twirling wine and letting a cigarette burn in her fingers, a rare, relaxed afternoon together for the three of us I recalled, with some astonishment the last job I had been on with the author: very compartment.

She came into the hide, said good morning, took of her jeans and blouse, put on the forensics and the surgical gloves. Picked the kit from the open wooden box, assembled it her self, checked every piece herself, checking the sites against her own clear vision measured against a pole we held up at her request. She took the brief, read once, but being a writer of plays it was already memorised, this checking is just a ritual, a calming. "Ready" said logistics lookout. She picked it up, aimed, one shot, then without a moment for breath or murmur or look dismantled, stripped off the forensics, pulled up her jeans and was gone out the tent. She was there less than four minutes. I watched her give a lecture in the British Council that evening since they say that even the coldest shooter can get traumatised but I saw no sign of that with her. Was it kind of legal? Sanctioned. Shelly laughed, she was sanctioned until she gave up her pants in exchange for ten years in orange.

Axeman

2007-05-14T08:31:00.001+02:00

Rudi said 'This geezer wanted to kill me once, take me off to the Serengeti National Park, do a bit of bonding, chain me up with his Canadian prison issue leg irons, the best there is on the open, then do for me with an axe and have lions eat up, gobble gobble, me carcass.'

'Why would he want to do that'

'He said I owed him money'

'Did he now. But you, Rudi, are here and he is not, leta habari?'

"He had got into one my schemes, cars, which had gone a bit wrong. But it turned out the dosh was not his, he had borrowed it from his sick wife's pension fund. She found out, he got upset and resolved to come over, do for me, then top himself."

"A dramatic reaction"

"Yeah So he had gone to buy his leg irons and this little axe, more of a chopper really, slipped them in his luggage and come to stay. His plan was that we should go off camping in the Serengeti, then whilst I was asleep he would chain me up, wake me up, tell me his reason and then set too with his chopper"

"Not an easy scheme"

"Well he was upset so not thinking that straight and it would be his first time. He hid the irons in his cupboard at my bait but I soon found them, took one of the keys, made a copy and on the night of the prospective killing had it taped securely around my penis. Good irons though , Canadina prison issue, strong, but more comfortable to wear than the US stuff.

"We had camped out in the Serengeti. He made supper, some safari concoction, a memory of when he had led his own safari trips. He chatted after dinner telling tales of his life and I guess calming his nerves a bit. He was stilted in his conversation but I left him talking until he suggested we go to sleep. We had a tent each.

It was a long time before he came to the tent, I had fallen asleep, it was, he must have planned it, towards dawn, the time of execution. He crawled in his leg irons wrapped in a blanket I suppose to stop them clanking, ghost style. He shackled my legs together, each closing click must have been a reassurance for him since I could have easily woken up at that moment. I did. Then he slipped outside to get his axe and put his courage to the sticking place.

"I sat up soon as he was gone, tore of the tape from my rock hard, I remember the sexual rush, best I ever had, until this day. I knew a few soldiers, some who used a lot of whores but they always said the best of it came from violence and the whores were a poor substitute for an addiction. At that moment I could understand them. The clean night air of the Serengeti rushed the blood around my body, I thought, um, I should get executed more often.

I was standing when he came back with the axe but had left the chains across my feet. He was shocked up to see me standing, a moment reassured when he glanced down to the leg irons, until I moved a foot and the iron fell off. I was naked, tumescent, he had a pair of khaki sorts on. He swung his little axe, I turned, it struck my shoulder, low down, where the big muscle is, sunk in, the back vibration and the shock jolted it from his hand. The axe stayed embedded for a moment then when I shrugged fell out. I could feel the blood, but not so much, no pain, some exhilaration"

"And you said"

Have you ever killed any one with an axe before?"

He stood, panting, glazing, he was shivering.

"It is in fact quite difficult to kill someone with an axe. Especially a little axe like that. It is OK in a judicial situation, like the Tower of London, or Saudi Arabia, big axe, victim restrained, but not good for your run of the mill murder. Better to use a knife, just keep stabbing away, you are bound to get an organ sometime. Just ask any of the husband killers you meet on the way.

"He swayed. I poked him in the chest with my finger. He fell over. I felt cold, I went to put some clothes on and to make us a cup of tea.

"Turns out he had some kind of heart condition which gave him palpitations. He told me where his pills were, I got him some. A couple of days later I drove him to the airport. God speed he said."

Rudi pulled a draught of is pint. I swirled my red wine, thought how much I wanted a cigarette. Husband murderers? Where did that come from?

I said "And the money"

"It was already back in his account. I did not want to say so since it would look like I gave into threats. And anyway I was curious to see whether he could go through with it. The first one is always hard

"How did you get the money?"

"Stole it from someone else. But that'' OK, there is no way to get rich legitimate, though your Bella disagrees with me. All money is stolen, it just goes around

Shelley laughed. That girl is getting quite light one year on.

Early Travels of Isobella Giles

2007-03-13T10:36:00.000+02:00

Packing properly is very important. It calms one before the journey, makes the transfers and the searches bearable, allows one to focus on the point of the journey. Isobella Giles from her first excursion made a list of absolutely everything she would put in her single wheeled travel case, plus, sometimes, in later years, irritatingly, a notebook computer.

At Dar es Salaam, ex British Airways, economy class (this being more than ten and a bit years ago), she took a pre-arranged taxi to the old, now the domestic, terminal where a three seater single prop plane was ready to take her and one other to Zanzibar. A watcher, observing her disembark, noted she wore a frock patterned with red pastel roses, though she was logged wearing worn denim blue jeans at Heathrow. On landing, she ducked out the cockpit, walked long stride to the terminal not glancing back allowing porters to collect her bag. She gave, "an impression of carefree confidence," when coming through the glass door of the small arrivals hall, arm extended, long white hands,

"Hi, I am Bella Giles, so pleased to meet you".

Later she was to express a moment of irritation at the presence of the watcher, brown eyes flashing anger. This flare of eye was to become a point of mention since her voice and expression was always, unfailingly, calm and diplomatic, professionally unemotional. Of the watcher she had said "There is such a thing as trust you know" but at the end of her early travels, when she had concisely, in excellent grammar perfect English, summarised many a watchers scribbles, ran her own teams too, there was no more mention of trust. "It is too big a word for what we do".

The plane from Chipping Norton dropped in tight circles so as to avoid the danger of rocket propelled grenades on the descent to Baghdad airport. Bella Giles had been concerned that this stomach to gullet falling would make her sick but to her quiet satisfaction it did not at all, Her steady smile and relaxed manner all the way through the airport, into the armoured truck, through the gates of the Green Zone entrance impressed the Officers, both serving and retired. Lt Col (ret) John T. Snelling, in charge of the Project ground operations, had been told, by radio, "our visitor is a tough one" and was further charmed by Bella's poise and politeness, perception and ability to take note. Others, ambitious men for whom this, like other wars. was a chance to shine, noted Bella too. The first night, accommodation being tight Bella got a camp bed in a room shared with two other Officers, "but it was ok, I put on a coat over my pajamas, went out like a light" Eight months earlier Bella had watched on a TV images from a Baghdad square showing the toppling of a large statue of Saddam Hussein. She remarked, when writing up, that she had never connected the image with her journey. "The reconstruction presents us with opportunities". The image of the statue falling she associated with eating choclate whislt watching TV.

Eighteen months after the earthquake the road to Kashmir was still badly damaged. The hours of consecutive hairpin bends, the sudden sight of chasmic drops, two days of hard driving in an BHC Landrover, were very tiring. "I had to wear a burka, for modesty, though I did not find it very flattering. As usual none of the chaps wanted to go. Family commitments" There is a picture of Bella standing beside a landrover, it is raining there are, as always in these pictures, a crowd of wide eyed children. There are broken buildings, water filled craters, gaunt proud men eyes directly in the camera. Bella is at three quarters profile, face hidden by the shadow of the burka. There are no recent pictures though she owns her own digital camera bought on a whim in Dubai. "I am not sure why I went. Though they think it is good to show a face at the site of disasters"

For most of her twenty four trips to Washington DC Bella stayed in a functional hotel near to the Office. It was more rooms than a hotel, you got in with a plastic key, there was no reception though in the morning breakfast was offered in a side room. Bella, being English, went there to get hot water for the tea she had packed and to observe who might be familiar. She walked each morning to the Office dressed smartly, dark skirts, jacket, lipstick. The Office rivalries were occasionally intriguing, sometimes, when she had to respond, annoying. "Most of my colleagues, not all, are decent people who believe in what we do and are very friendly and helpful." Her reports were well written often read. more perceptive than in the beginning, aware of other options. Bella observed that as the scope of electronic surveillance has increased the only way to keep something confidential was to write in pencil, on paper, then shred and burn the shreds.

Bella said "You just think, remember the truth you have decided on today, forget it for a new one tomorrow!*

Bella said "When I started my travels there were the bad and the good, now, I am as likely to be arrested as you"

When Bella started travelling she was twenty two, when the early travels were over she was nearly thirty seven. Although there are no photographs, her hairdresser stayed the same, a chap she had grown used to with a shop on the High Street. "Isobella has kept her hair a little shorter in recent summers."

Fat Greek

2007-03-12T17:20:00.000+02:00

Casinos have never enthralled me, crooked business funded upon the foolish and the desperate. In Europe and Uncle Sam's parlour they are presently quite supervised so the ropier ones have gone south, even unto Africa, where they lodge in the basements of shopping centres or, as in Fat Greeks, the upper floor of the smartest hotel in town. Not liking these places is a view but using them is still a consideration: amongst the foolish, desperate and greedy we find our information and our living. I don't like to leave the beach, but once I went to Fat Greeks just to look at the man and his charm. He is very fat, two hundred kilos, his thighs jammed together so that there are seeping ulcers. Within a minute of coming under his glance he sent over a glass of wine, within an hour, "where is your place, I will buy it and open a casino". Fat Greek eats. I said to Shelly, "Methinks a waste of time, he will surely just expire upon his own."

A variant of poker known now as Texas Hold 'Em has become the most popular commercial form of the game because the number of open cards allows players to make a calculation of the odds on their hand winning. This allows the illusion that the game is more of skill than chance or bluff. A professional poker player, a Spade Man, will, when behaving, always play the odds, if you play enough and the other players know less or play less of the odds than you then, in the end, the probabilities will out and there will be a profit. The thing is to find high stakes card rooms with lots of rich bad players and place a couple of Spades. It is not easy, to come out good a Spade needs to play seventy thousand hands a year, which means four nights of ten hours a week. If too many of the players are any good, they know the arithmetic, it wont work, the Casino wins via the rake. But in southern places lots of people have been stealing with impunity for decades and these new card rooms, of which Fat Greek runs one, are a place for Spade Men to play.

Why don't Spade Men play on their own account? Because, to play those odds for those hours they need to concentrate, to endure the adrenalin surges each hand creates, to will the right card to drop, to live without daylight and in consequence, like most. like me, they have vices, always related to sex and alcohol. And they have dreams, they think they are good, therefore the cards, one day, will free them from the mundane. I knew these dreams. So I know how ever much a Spade makes he will blow it and so need a Staker, someone to put up the funds and split the percentage. So we staked a bit, for while it had worked, but then Fat Greek had cottoned and banned our best Spades from the table.

The Bulgarian dealers enter clacking a clip clop on the shining tiles, two by two, six deep, pencil thin in pencil skirts, faces made up to blank all but the scarlet smile. At the entrance the principal hostess, in toe length dress, "voluptuous sheen" comes to my mind. Fat Greek squatting puffing on a low stool watches the table fill. Shelly, now Maureen from Glasgow, short term under manager, fusses and busy bees. She looks the part, a bit of quick suntan, a slap of makeup over prison pallor. I mused that the lighting in prisons and casinos is alike. I glanced at our mark:the card room manager, a smooth Boer, white teeth, lily white arse (Shelly's description), gleaming white shirt black pointed shoes, called, at least in here, Myron.

The players gather. Mohammed, coiffured oiled dark hair, tinted glasses, cigarette held finger and thumb under the palm, Dubai money, drives a Lexus, serviced apartment upper floor, down town. JP, one of several Asian importers, fortunes made from textiles, nuts and bolts, second hand clothes, iron-mongery. They come to show off, to play, to lose money but strictly to each other. There are Chinese, latterly more, but there are always Kong's in card rooms. A fool or two, a Singh. a greasy haired Scandinavian, maybe someones Spade?

Myron says "Playing tonight? Five hundred thousand initial buy in. Only players allowed inside the card room once we deal"

I say "not tonight". Maureen, experienced casino worker, once of Glasgow, via America, keeps her back to me as I leave. After the dry casino air the tropical night sheens my face until I reach the the harbour breeze. My cab slinks out along Ocean Road, I remember the uplifted feeling, put it down to adrenalin but maybe it was twenty four hours with out an alcoholic drink. There would be a long time of waiting and watching, nothing much for me to do. I counted the misgivings, noted that it felt good, intoxicating, as dangerous as new sex, to be operating again after seven years of laying low. And on my own account, not a partner or an employer or any good reason to disturb the peace, my life of lies, false promises, oppurtune delusions.

Nightshade

2007-02-06T16:06:00.000+02:00

Shelly came to stay on release from a stint of almost a decade in a Federal prison, "five days short of the ten years", she said, "I almost could have had a milestone". For many men jail becomes soon enough just another club but I would once have thought to spend between thirty and forty there would be a hard time for a woman, but she was matter of fact about it when I met her from the plane. "A professional hazard" was how she put it. It had been a cold place in the winter and she felt it good to get some sun now that she was free to choose. I saw that she was travelling on a passport in her given name so I supposed it was a break whilst she got a new disguise. Convictions are a nuisance like that, brings things out into the open and I was glad then to have avoided that inconvenience.

We drove down to the village so Shelly could buy a bikini. "I have one somewhere but it has been ten years since I wore it". She was pale when she came but looked fit and trim "The food was lousy but the gym was good". It was her style to be cryptic before we necessarily lost touch and I smiled to see how she had kept the habit as part of coping.

She went to the beach, "be careful of the sunburn, you are rather pale". She was but she was in need of all that natural vitamin D. She swam a bit, the sea is very blue and warm and inviting in this place, got used again to the slinky feel of touch. In the evening, starting rather later than me, she drank some wine, "Not so used the pop these days, need to get some tolerance slowly"
Her rejuvenation came along quickly, "been planning it ever since I got that get out date", too quickly I thought when she said, a few weeks in, "Michael how 'bout you and me scheme a heist?"

I raised two eyebrows. Once the moment of surprise had gone I surmised that in her absence Shelley had remained unaware of Uncle Sam's increased ability and interest in checking out remote places, but even not knowing that it was a short time out to be thinking of getting in again. It was not as she needed the money, it is cheap to live in jail and we had kept her share, ten years of rinsing had made it very clean and it grown rather fluffy. Living outside costs a lot more,many of the stunts had cost a lot and not been designed to earn, others, more than enough had gone badly wrong. I was enjoying the quiet life and not a bit interested in coming out of retirement. Especially for a heist.

"Lost your nerve, Michael, dear?"

"I wonder that myself. But times have changed, or I have. The watchers are better these days, much better, and you having been convicted will be easy to clock."

Convictions, or any kind of belief are a nuisance. Unless you are a watcher.

I wondered if she was convinced or just thought I was old and soft from the beach. What I said was true enough, the watchers are so much better, I had done quite a bit of watching myself so I knew their skills and ways. I knew, in theory at least, the ways around them too. But for Shelly a heist now, just for the thrill would be very risky. At the time she had thought of pleading not guilty but the evidence against was decently strong and with out the plea she could have got double so she went for the bargain, the years and the conviction.

We hung around, I had got used to that, enjoyed it, so had Shelly but she had not had a choice so was keen to do something. She got stronger as she ate our good food, (I ran a pub) , we went to the local cocktail bar and she got up to speed on handling the pop. But still she was restless in a way I never am. I thought about what we might do. It is not as if we can mark time with conventional jobs, nor can we go anywhere without a lot of arrangement. Yet decent stunts are hard to find, risk free ones impossible. Shelly noticed my discomfort, relaxed a bit, I had the sense that she believed I would come up with something. Something that did not get her in parol violation whilst she had her real name and, more important, kept me obscure.

I said " We could have a go at doing some damage to Fat Greek"

"What you have aginst him? "

"Not so much really. Not so much I would bother if it was not for you. He messed up a stunt that was going well, but not so well as to be that much. But good for practice"

"Rich and powerfull?"

Certainly. No point in the pop otherwise.

"What advantage have we got"

"He does not know you"

"True, I have not been around for a while"

I looked, she smiles, women do. I have a weakness for jail birds. And I suppose I dont like Fat Greek. And they, and the watchers had named Shelly "Nightshade" because she was so deadly.

Mysogyny

2007-01-07T08:50:00.000+02:00

Older people experience the onset of invisibility, they get used to it as everything else. It commences when someone is no longer seen as a hunter or a target in the courtship rituals. This will happen sometime in middle age, earlier if the milieu is one of youth. Some try to resist, becoming more flamboyant and always more foolish, others embrace the chance of disappearance, to come and go and make their mischief unrecognised and unremembered. This fellow was one of these, though I watched and wondered if he knew, as I do, that you are not invisible to those are themselves of the disappeared.

He was always when I saw him perfectly polite, always sunny faced, a half smile well prepared and practiced. He said little but then we all did. In those bars at that time it was not done to talk of where you got your money or to ask another's history and if those matters are excluded then men have very little to talk about once the good day pleasantries are done for. In this I thought he was as the rest of us, secret, sad, probably nursing a last set of idiotic ambitions. What made me notice more was how he flinched at the presence of women. I too was of an age of invisibility, I could watch and listen with impunity. Whereas I stayed still, he shrunk up,slipping wraith and silent away so that no trace of his presence could be felt by them.

I asked if the fear was greater than the loathing.

"In equal measure, though this milk of hatred slops as tube tilts so sometimes all fear and other times all is loathing or any measure in between. When all is fear I shrink, when all is loathing I am scared of other danger"

I did not see so much of him for a while, his, perhaps unguarded words, had made him aware that the disappeared can, should they mind too, see each other though they are not seen by others. There were no murders of women at that time, not here, though I read reports of such things in Seattle and Ipswich, Montreal and Delhi. There was a murder of a man but it was said this was arranged by his wife though investigations were never conclusive. I knew her too.

Then he was back, one after midnight when I still with adrenalin from a professional chore, sitting across the bar eyes ablaze, more prominent, more content. He had a coke beside him, the lemon stacked in it suggested there was rum as well. It occur ed to me, in one of those irritating unbidden thoughts that come to one that he had the air of someone who had dined very well whereas his normal air was of being rather hungry. There were several pretty creatures there still, it was the hour when the courtships fail or not but he ignored them as he always had, comfortably invisible. I shifted back, into the dark, turned lighting a cigarette as an excuse, so that my own obvious invisible self did not intrude upon his and light him up. He sipped out the rum, the bar was mostly drunks now, slipped away, walkng lightly. I shamble.

Months past, we had not forgotten out glances, but as we want in this place nothing happened. Visiotrs come and go, they are the source of most business here, stay a few days, leave, knowing everything about the place. Most of those who stay use the visitors to provide our anonimity so we try not to know them individually. I had not forgotten him, but rather not paid him any mind. I went down to the supermarket to buy shampoo, then, seeing it was twilight, I went down for a beer before the red wine got opened back home. I don't have much sense of smell but there was a feel of breath on my neck, white hairs rising. I turned, his hungry look was back.

"Hi, long time" I said

He looked straight forward, he spoke,

I have watched you" He breathed a rasp and turned a bit to me, "You sit here invisibly, you avoid the presence of women but you have the hungry eyes of a killer. Nothing has happened but if it ever did I would know where they should first look".

As if the mirror reflection has spoken.

Pheasants

2006-11-28T10:32:00.000+02:00

She can drive. She can drive rally, takes bends real tight, hitting the accelerator off the top of the curve just a treat, zipping up behind. She knows those Scottish back roads well enough to be her own navigator, which bend goes blind, which opens out to offer a space and get on past where I will flinch and brake. As we slide by, I will turn, ugly and cold, to look at the scared creased shaking faces of the drivers we were too closely passing, up beside them before they had looked in the rear view. She is very literary and likes to listen to very literary talking books as we drive, though sometimes she will change to a tape of the "Doors", the best of, with "Riders on the Storm" as the last track.

We came around that bend very fast, there was a crunching of gravel beneath the passenger side wheel, tight that one, even by her standards, a brown lochan ready to swallow, car overturned, a hiss of steam, water too cold to get out in time. It was October, the shooters were already gathered in the field. Three pheasants were in the road, blood red plumage. They ran left then right, she neither slowed or swerved, maybe if anything a touch more welly for stability as we took up the hundred metres of straight road before the next. There was one crunch, the other two went under the chassis. I looked behind, a purple carnage and scattered plume marked her road kill.

She said, so correctly, "They are bred to be killed".

Further on a group of four people walked the kerb in single file. They were a family configuration, a man, a woman, two smaller figures. All were very fat, wobbling, swaying and rolling but they did not turn to look as we drew near

Quietly spoken "More people have started to walk along this road. It is very dangerous. "

I think I tensed a bit, I did look for the gap, it was chasmic, she moved out very wide at the end, cutting back quickly, a firmer hold of the steering wheel, a push to feel resistance some surge to get traction as we turned back against the camber. I perspired a bit, kept quiet though, listened to the talking book narrator painting his other world, it was that day, Platform" by Houlbeq.

We did a few jobs together, in those old days, after the first of the big bombs, the one at the US Embassy in Dar, between the time that the Mossad girls were there, since only that lot saw the threat, but before the swamping the Brits and Yankees did once the Horsemen had been taken to be the next big thing. I did the transport, logistics, driving then, she always did the trigger stuff. It was said she kept cool, comfortable, morally sure when the moment in the cross hairs came: meant mostly in a metaphorical sense. Partly it was because she was better cover. She is a writer between jobs; plays, reviews, short stories, teaches too, does workshops and schools, a very literary background melded with a diplomatic manner. Good opinions too, green, left liberal, practical aid, all expressed with elegance and a refined care for language. She is a person everyone is pleased to know, admires, appreciates. It was thus better she did the trigger stuff, because as the other Michael remarked, there is too much "ug" about me, enough for people to say, when musing about who dun it "I don't have any evidence but I would not put it past him".

This cool made her matter of fact about the passions of life, took them naturally. Besides the cars she has a motorbike, now as then, a big one, some 750 HP of Yamaha,with all the leathers and space helmet. I liked the thrill when she said good bye: "see you down there then", straddled, one foot on the running board, enjoying how the engine purred up the vibrations. I liked her bed style too, enthusiastic, natural, uninhibited, a healthy way without the speeches. Even then she was always professionally alert, kept her eyes open all the time even at the moment of the shrieking. In that way she is like the the Mossad girls were but in all other of the professional she has more sophistication, more panache. For all the efficiency with which the Mossad girls honey trapped the minor dealers, then disappeared, job done, there was a certain gaucheness in their style. They were always just a bit too expert at what they pretended to know nothing, of too much vapidity in the brooding silences. This one, with all her books, is a better covered pheasant killer.

Insult

2006-09-26T06:45:00.000+02:00

Squeaky Dot wrote a letter to Michael in the Peoples Democratic Republic of Yemen.

"I expect you are sitting out in the dark and desolate place wondering if I am sleeping with someone else, well I have to tell you I am"

Julie China said "I don't fancy you anymore, but would you like one last bonk before the mirror". There was a football match playing on the TV in the Amsterdam hotel room.

The Icon took a bite when Michael was sleeping, "You are hopeless" she said

Sarah Stevens said, whilst walking in the park in Farnham, came up with

"You are too old, too ugly, too fat for me". All of which was most manifestly true.

Rachel Surrey dumped Michael by mobile phone whilst waiting in the check out queue in Tesco, what better way for a busy career woman to best utilise some dead time.

These events amuse, they make a tale, are part of the stuff of relationships, are what women do. A man can justify some fear and loathing by these tales, explain not being married or of having sired children. But they are hardly insults, these are women.

Tim King invited Michael to his very smart hotel for a curry lunch on Sunday. Michael was not so keen but it is only polite as a neighbour. Arriving for lunch Tim extended greetings, showed him to a table on the lower level of the restaurant. Then he called a waiter who listed the numerous bits and pieces of the colonial tradition. Then Tim said he was leaving to join his high table and left the man he had invited to eat on his own. Of course Michael walked out, but too late, the insult had been wonderfully delivered. Only a man can effectively insult another man, and in so doing define there relations in every other sphere until they die.

I have seen Tim plenty of times since then, we are always polite, formal, if we have to speak we do. I sometimes think such gratuitous insults ignore the rule of unnecessary enemies: "Do not make unnecessary enemies, there will come plenty enough on there own". I surmise that if you are that rich and powerful there is every confidence in the power to always vanquish.

Lisa turning her face three quarters to the light, the blond mane dropping to so prettily frame face, a perfected gesture, speaking posh with a dash of Essex.

"Michael sitting here amongst this beauty you are such a bitter, twisted, obsessive, cantankerous old sod"

Supermarket

2006-09-11T14:01:00.000+02:00

A man drifted back to the country of his birth when the difficulties of living in Darkness and the siren sounds of woman had pulled him home. In a scheme to get acquainted and to re learn the mores and means of what was once his own country he took a job in a super market, a small one, Marks and Spencers in Wimbledon. He was surprised to get the job, he presumed they had not really checked the references he gave, or they were so desperate for labour that they could not afford to. He mused that there had been a suggestion from some fool in human resources that older men may be more reliable than the school children and students, former bank clerks, disgruntled nurses, abandoned mothers that were their usual fodder.

The man got on well during the training course and back in the shop. He had an easy smile, a charm made smooth by many years of associating with diplomats and the sensibilities of people of other cultures. He spoke with ease and humour, skills necessary to those who have always to lie. The job was dull but the customers were affable, pleased to find a cheeful fellow amongst the scolds who more usually worked the tills. He helped the older ladies amongst the customers with their gambling on horse races , took bets for them when they were reluctant to go to the bookies themselves, gave tips and made sure the winnings were decently distributed whatever horse won the race. The supervisor, a peroxided proletarian called Tina, found her natural suspicions of this interloper confirmed by the long queues at the mans till point and a reluctance of the customers to move the line to an empty till when invited. Invited is wrong, in paid work the phrase "would you do this or that for me" has become the mantra of the oppressive boss. He felt, so he told me later, the first resurgence of his hatred when he heard this incessantly repeated request.

The supervisor acting on her instinct that this man was not of them started to harass him with the practicised nagging natural to both her profession and her sex. In the morning before the shop opened he had the job of filling the vegetable racks. The trays of old potatoes, the carrots, the chemically preserved salads all had to be put in their places on the shelves according to a store plan carefully devised by merchandising who were represented by freshly made up graduates in black skirts or blue shirts, who arrived early, harassed by the traffic, from their suburban places. The supervisor complained the man filled the shelves too slowly, that it was too close to opening time before the shelves were stacked. He ignored her lies. She increased the pressure by writing out disciplinary reports which he refused to sign. Though he smiled still, she knew he did not fit and would in the end be a cause of some unspecified disruption.

One morning she asked him to move to stacking frozen chickens. I think he saw already the inevitable and after four months there was ready to hasten the outcome. He stacked chickens so slowly, made the others laugh and delay with too many funny remarks that the fellow chicken stackers, two b and t women were pleased to complain to Tina that weight was not being pulled. Tina came to remonstrate.

The man, calmly, but with some deliberation, stepped forward, into what in the culture of women is known as personal space. Softly, but loud enough to be clear to all around, using a very careful diction he said

"Tina if you speak to me like that I will kill you. That would be very bad for you and very bad for me. Don't do it"

The frozen chickens were left across the floor. Tina ashen stepped back, reclaimed her space. The man left by the lift collecting his jacket and stalking though the halls of Centre Court just as the security officers readied to open the doors to the early morning shoppers. He returned mid morning to sign off with personnel represented then by an an over weight professionally amiable man called Bob.

"This woman says you threatened to kill her, and whilst I understand your sentiments, you cannot say that kind of thing in an English workplace"

The man said "You cannot say that type of thing anywhere".

I heard this story in a bar, where I hear all my stories and I never expected to see him again. I have though, in Darkness, to where he returned happier once his attemt to come home had failed and he could comfortably die in Darkness. I see him somtimes, always charming, always witty, always smiling, soft spoken, the careful diction and changing accent covering the stammers his life has created. He survives as he did before on the desperate schemes of migrants every where. He never keeps the company of women, or when they come by his converation quick and quiet he moves away, as if he feels they will notice the change of temperature. But maybe that is a preference: to walk away is the civilised response to insult.

Death by Hammock

2006-09-05T20:08:00.000+02:00

Sarah Stevens is a tall, big nosed, big arsed, privately educated Surrey girl, a type that has aroused my primeval side and led on occasion to an association that in the end has always been a mistake. Such liaisons, sometimes sexual, I think, when in retrospective mood, a contributing element in my disappointment, but have on the other hand justified a lot of drinking. I can’t remember if I enjoyed the sex. I cannot remember it so I suppose not much is the answer. Did they? Not much I reckon.

She started of as a dressmaker, got her own business doing wedding dresses, was good at it until all those bride mothers got her broken. She went around the world on the insurance money, learnt to dance, poles and salsa, whatever was the fashion. I met her drifted up in Dar es Salaam sitting in a beach bar covered in a hairy dog. She was ready to ditch a short broke German and not so interested in the fat one who would take his place.

We went to down to Ruaha.

"Do you expect to sleep with me just because you take me to a game park"

I stopped the car.

'After fifteen years in Africa I would hardly want to drive fourteen hours to see another elephant"

But I had no such expectations, Surrey girls, decide themselves when it is time to go to Ascot.
We hung out a bit, I liked her tales, but it did not go far. She gave me one of the better dear john lines in my career: too fat, too old, too ugly. I laughed, it was all true at least, though now I am rather thinner.

Back in London town she did more dancing, Salsa rather than pole, got hooked up with a Columbian who hunted in those Piccadilly places. He told me that he could not understand why these girls some from as far as Manchester came to dance Salsa and lost their handbags so easily. But I could. Sarah got in with him, got pregnant, it was her age to do so, fading thirties. She put the Colombian up in my flat for a while, Surrey Girls, do have a ruthless side beneath that big smiling diplomatic charm. And a good line in brutal endings, perhaps that is where I learnt it. Rachel Warren was even better in put downs, a phone call form the Tesco Check out queue: "Your clothes are in your car"

Juan was not so hot as a petty criminal, credit card stealing, street muggings, female Japanese tourists were a good bet, these mix badly with speeding tickets, driving without insurance and belting the missus. These can attract the attention of Plod.
"This is not Columbia" I told him, but to no avail and soon enough Juan was with Her Majesty more often than on the streets. Whilst doing time our Colombian was offered the acquaintance of a well known Lord also in residence who expressed a considerable interest in acquiring prime pieces of Colombian art. Snow sculptures. So on release Juan financed with the benefits of Sarah's credit card went off to seek out such valuables, whilst his mother, son, and the parrot kept up Sarah's home.
The old school pals conferred and decided that Sarah must be rescued, came up with an officer once of the Black Watch called Frederique Christiaan Von Winkle Hesse-Nassau. He is a rather hapless fellow, he would have been rather out of time in the century before last but these members of the decadent officer class are still about, protected by regimental traditions, the comradeship of the Officer Mess and often the convenience of The Official Secrets Act. He is tall, gangly, inbred with a white office made pate.

Juan and Winkle came to meet, he sat on the couch cradling his regimental bayonet whilst Juan bayed and pounded in the streets. In the end our hero avoided confrontation by calling Plod who, belatedly arriving, discovered Colombian in serious breach of his parole conditions so it was a do not pass go and do not collect two hundred pounds but straight back to Porridge. Eight months later when he re-emerged to have another go it was me sitting in the lounge. No more Juan trouble.

Von Winkle Hesse Nassau having left the army, a rather vague career, but ending in tears on an aero plane from Ulster, set up a furniture importing operation but the realities of commerce were not a world he could know. Officers rallied round and he settled in a job about which he told me rather more than he should have. I suppose with a bottle of whisky it is tempting to make sure that the lower classes know their position in natures order. I am not prepared to talk about that with the likes of you was the preferred genre of answer, complete with a wave of the hand and a sulk. That it was an insult would not occur, a cockroach cannot be insulted. But on such insults have most slaughters been predicated.

Von Winkle swung his adopted son most violently in the hammock. It is his belief, as in Sparta, that the brutalising of males before the age of five is the most vital part of their education and must be done before they get into the hands of the mamby pambies who run schools today. Having done his duty Von Winkle plonked himself in the hammock, whereupon the supporting pole, rotten and finally weakened by his disciplining, snapped and cracked him most smartly on his very white pate whilst the sand below gave a most undignified thump to the imperial posterior. The cut was long and quite deep. I have kept my cuts together with toilet paper but Von Winkle, for fear of ugly scars, signs of hanging out with the cockroach class, went, with my car to the clinic and had seven neat stitches inserted. There was no lasting damage but dignity, the insult, required a most humble apology and some financial compensation. He never got the apology, but got the compensation by the simple expedient of reneging on his hotel bill. They are all cads in the end.

I was rather disappointed in my pole but I suppose there is only so much one can expect of a rotten hammock pole. I told Joan Lawrence who came around amongst quite a few Zombies recently, now that the hotel is quieter, that I had thought death by hammock might have been a good way to do for the Butler.

Her eyes were very blue, translucent.

"Michael, you will have to think again:"

The Washermans hat covered all the expressive bits of his visage, but I think I saw the momentary flare of a nostril. One has to have a sense of humour.

Stunt

2006-08-16T13:04:00.000+02:00

She told me she worked as a nurse, I told her I worked as a Crown Agent. It was a long time ago, it was the seventies there was not much more that needed to be said. We talked about my place or her place, we decided upon her basement flat, in Clapham quite near the Junction. I parked up the street a way, even then it was an unnecessary risk to be right outside the door. Her bed was a platform, there a quilt with a ruby coloured cover untidily invitingly left where it had fell when last she rose up. The bed was in front and below the window which was set higher than the

"My boyfriend is a stunt man in the films, he does falls and car crashes, he stands me up as well"

I had seen him at the squash club, a short fellow, she was taller than him. He played squash in a dangerous way slamming the ball as hard as he could with no reckoning of the direction it would go. I had seen him with her at the bat now she mentioned it, his face looked squashed. Too many stunts had ended with him landing on his head.

February was cold that year, in London too the night air was below freezing, the snow had melted and frozen again as black ice on the streets. Sometimes it took a bit to get my Renault started a few too noisy attempts. We waited coated and embraced in the still unheated flat. There was a pay-phone in the hall way which rang, noisy bells, it could be heard by all the occupants in all the flats.

I could hear her voice, but not make out the words, I stayed still not wanting to disturb her bedroom when she was not inside. On the floor were written notes, I imagined they were reminders to herself.

Her phone call ended, she was beside me again.

"You have not moved" she said

"That was the stunt man. He says he is coming round here and if I do not open the door he is coming straight through the window."

I asked her if she thought he would do that, land on the head of who ever was in the bed below.

"I do not think so....But he could.....he might. It might be better to go to your place."

We went up the stairs her breath steaming in the night air. We walked quietly quickly to the Renault, I unlocked the passenger door, holding open whilst she swung her legs through. The Renault started first time, the engine turning quietly. With the lights of I looked in the rear view. The stunt man's MG sports car drew up parking beside her house lights full on. The stunt man leaving the car door gaping went to the door,rang her bell. He pounded the door, the thump coming deadened through the cold air, he did not shout. Stopping his pounding our man went back to the MG, got in, turned the lights off, quietly clunked the door shut. In the street light glow I watched his heels rise,legs tense and with practicised grace he drop kicked himself through the basement window. There was shattering glass noise. I eased the Renault away in first, very slowly, tyres slithering and slipping, fish tailing on the black ice. Down by the Junction I turned the lights on heading towards Wandsworth.

In the morning I left her sleeping when I went to the office of the Crown Agents. Mrs Kenton, who was my flat mate, helped her find a mini cab when she woke.

We did not meet for eight years, I had been to live in the PDRY, then in Guinea Conarkry. When I returned I went again to the sports club where we had met and one day saw her at the bar the same stool where we first had met.

"I was shocked to see that woman in your flat. I thought at first it was your wife. But she was very nice. "

She had stayed with the Stunt Man, he had fixed the windows, then had moved on, got married, had tow kids, got divorced, come back to the club where we had met.

Cult Leader

2006-08-11T01:11:00.000+02:00

To be seen

I got a letter from the tax people demanding a lot of back tax. I had written up the books to show we did not owe any tax. I saw that he had disallowed lots of our expenses in particular the cost of water.

We run a hotel, there are no water pipes to the so we bring water by truck. Our guests pay a decent sum to stay here, they are well brought up, they like to wash a lot, have showers, ablute. We need water, even though bringing it in a truck is expensive. It is a major expense

I told this to the man from the tax. He was sympathetic but adamant. Water is provided free in Zanzibar, a part of the constitutional right of citizens therefore it cannot be paid for and therefore cannot be a tax allowable expense.

Aha. Indeed.

But I am not a citizen therefore maybe I can pay for water and then it could be an allowable expense. It could be, it could be not. We will discuss. We will agree, we will be legal and lunched.

I did not come to Africa to change Africa, I will leave that to DFID and the Charities. I came to make lots of money and run off with it. I failed.