A Darkening Stain by Robert Wilson Page A

of a pair of grey cotton trousers which had been pounded that colour by an African washerwoman. ‘What would he get out of killing me?’
    â€˜I wasn’t being serious.’
    â€˜Smoke some more.’
    I took a longer drag on the reefer, which seemed to satisfy him. I fitted the joint between his fuck-you fingers and he nestled back into his chair.
    â€˜The only reason I’m living is because of Jean-Luc. So why would he want to kill me?’
    â€˜I didn’t say he would.’
    â€˜Non?
    The dope was ungluing the conversation fast. A warm glow emanated from my stomach which was being fuelled by my extremities which felt like frozen chicken parts. My eyeballs prickled. My tongue was lilo size and dry and musty like sun-scorched canvas. The whisky added no lick to my mouth. The silence I was in now felt long and ruminative of such things as the wood grain in Charbonnier’s desk, the two missing eyelets in his plimsolls and the crepey quality of the skin on the back of his hands.
    â€˜How did Jean-Luc get cut up?’ I asked, after a small century of chair creaking.
    â€˜Uhn?’ said Michel, resettling himself and tilting back in his captain’s chair. I repeated the question. Time leaked through my fingers.
    â€˜Sierra Leone,’ said Michel, while I tried to remember the question. He handed back the joint. I waved it away. He insisted.
    â€˜What happened in Sierra Leone?’ I asked, the smoke leaking out of me everywhere, the corners of my eyes, my knuckle joints. ‘What was he doing there?’
    â€˜Buying diamonds,’ he said, from what seemed a long way off now.
    He eased the joint out of the back of my hand, which was no longer mine, but lay quietly on the desk top ready to be put on.
    â€˜He trades diamonds?’ I asked.
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜Why did he buy them?’
    â€˜Jean-Luc is an opportunist. He sees a rebel army taking over a diamond mine. He thinks those diamonds are going to be cheap. All I have to do is risk my ... my life and ... to get the diamonds ... and then...’
    â€˜What went wrong?’
    â€˜There are factions in these rebel armies. He bought from one. He headed north to Guinée and met another. They didn’t like the white man so much. They cut him with machetes. He was lucky if you...
comment dit-on ça: “chérir”?’
    â€˜Cherish.’
    â€˜... if you cherish your life so much that you are happy to live the rest of it as a monster.’
    â€˜He hasn’t always been a monster then?’ I asked, the drug drawing together previously unengaged synapses. Michel blinked.
    â€˜That was four months ago,’ he said.
    I blinked back at him with a shutter speed of several seconds and found somebody else inside me asking another question.
    â€˜How did you meet Jean-Luc?’
    The reefer was now barely a couple of inches long and, after the toke Michel took, red hot, so that he came off it hissing and licking his lips. He slotted it into an ashtray which had a mini Michelin tyre around it and lifted his legs off the desk one after the other as if they were spastic. He opened up a drawer in the middle of his desk and pulled out a pack of old photographs of different sizes held together by an elastic band. He flicked
through them and extracted one. He held it face down on the desk top. He threw the rest in the drawer and shut it. He turned the photo up and laid it in front of me as if that was the one that was going to give me a royal straight flush at Binion’s Horseshoe, Vegas.
    The photo was of a young guy, late twenties/early thirties, with a mane of shoulder-length black hair. He was wearing extremely brief swimming trunks and had the face and body of somebody who could have modelled pants
pour homme
, and all the women would have run out and bought the stock thinking the pants
are
the man. He was standing on tiptoe on a beach which I knew was in the front of the Hotel Sarakawa in