A Darkening Stain by Robert Wilson Page B

the Togolese capital, Lomé.
    Michel’s face just outside the scoop of light across the desk was intense and taut and heavily focused on me.
    â€˜Is this you?’ I asked.
    â€˜
Oui, c’est moi
,’ he murmured, as if he’d been in a perfume ad after all.
    â€˜A long time ago, Michel. That’s what West Africa does to you. It’s very unkind to white-skinned Euro—’
    He slammed his fist down on the table and roared a spray of spit into the light marking the worn leather inlay of the desk.
    â€˜Six years ago!’ he said.
    He wrenched the head of the Anglepoise towards him and shone it full in his own wreck of a face.
    â€˜Look!’
    He scrabbled a claw across the desk and tore the photo from me and held it up to his face.
    â€˜I’ve lost everything.’
    The paranoia I’d hinted at earlier was creeping up on me. The heat, lack of air, the brain-smacking strength of the grass and Charbonnier’s eerie transformation had sent the jitters going in my head like a techno tropical night bird. I wanted out but I was pinned to my seat.
    â€˜Four days after this photograph was taken I met Jean-Luc Marnier.’
    â€˜What were you doing in the Sarakawa?’ I asked, going for the camomile question.
    He leaned back out of the light and slipped the photograph back in the drawer. It took some doing, my arms were as heavy as a dead man’s legs, but I managed to get the glass of whisky up to my lips and drain it. Michel took a bottle of J & B out of the cabinet and poured me a careful quarter inch.
    â€˜I was a journalist,’ he said. ‘I was planning to canoe the length of the Niger river from Bamako in Mali right through to its mouth in Nigeria. While I was planning the trip up in Niamey I heard there was trouble in Lomé so I stopped the recce and came down to the coast. I filed reports on the troubles from the Sarakawa.’
    â€˜And you met Marnier.’
    â€˜He was running an alternative and user-friendly bank for expats and travellers. I had my wallet and credit cards stolen in the Grand Marché and he had them picked up off the street in a matter of hours. He saved me a lot of trouble. We became friends.’
    Something like chilli from a hot soup got stuck in his throat on the word ‘friends’.
    â€˜What sort of friends?’
    â€˜I was naive...’
    â€˜Naive people don’t always make the best journos.’
    â€˜I didn’t say I was a good journalist. I was very
sportif,
journalism let me do what I wanted to. Paid for my ideas. I cycled across the Sahara. I’ve skied down the Himalayas. I’ve crewed round-the-world yachts. I’ve ballooned across the Gobi.’
    â€˜Did you canoe down the Niger?’
    â€˜No,’ he said, hitting the buffers in the terminal.
    I had a queue of questions in three lanes for Charbonnier but I knew if I asked one of them we’d be gridlocked for the
night. He’d rambled across some old painful episodes which hadn’t been aired for some years and the spliff had brought them back pin sharp. He looked over the wall by his desk as if it was a surface to which he was about to expose his genius. His hands hung off the arms of his chair above his lap. His tongue, pointed and muscular, came out of the crevice of his mouth in the enquiring way of a mollusc on the slab. His eyelids drooped. I thought he was laying the onion skins over the ugliness until I saw, with a stink of disgust, that he was sporting the contour of an erection in his lap.
    â€˜Michel,’ I said, which brought him round. He pulled his knees up and rested his heels on the edge of his chair so that his balls bulged graphically in the crotch of his soiled trousers. I was getting the Heike-eye view of Charbonnier now.
    â€˜You were saying,’ he said.
    â€˜I thought
you
were.’
    â€˜
Ah, c’est le tour de la’sèche fines herbes
,’ he said, and reached for the now