A Darkening Stain

‘Whatever.’

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

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

‘Enjoy,’ he said. ‘There’s not much else around here.’

I nodded at his porno drawing and took another quarter drag from the joint, not wanting to get wrecked in the first minute and waste my time here.

‘Not here, M. Medway. Not in Africa. There’s plenty of girls to fuck, but, you know how it is for them, fucking the white man c’est comme un travail de ménage.’

‘You shouldn’t knock yourself like that, Michel.’

‘Knock myself?’ he asked, rapping his head.

‘Tu ne dois pas dire du mal de toi-même,’ I said. ‘There’s plenty of other people around who’ll do it for you.’

He grunted and leaned back in his chair.

‘You need to smoke some more, M. Medway. Take it in…deep.’

‘Marnier,’ I said, sipping the whisky, the strong flavour of the grass like a hay espresso in my mouth. ‘Tell me about Marnier. Why do you have to do little jobs for him? Especially when you don’t like doing them for him…do you?’

‘I have no choice.’

‘What’s he going to do to you if you don’t?’ I asked. ‘Kill you?’

‘Kill me. Pah!’ he roared, and rocked back on his wooden chair. He fought his feet out from under the desk and put them up on an unopened ream of paper he had sitting next to the phone. He was wearing dirty white plimsolls with no laces. He drew a hand down his gaunt features, picking up some sweat on the way which he wiped on to the thigh 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?’

‘I wasn’t being serious.’

‘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.

‘The only reason I’m living is because of Jean-Luc. So why would he want to kill me?’

‘I didn’t say he would.’

‘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.

‘How did Jean-Luc get cut up?’ I asked, after a small century of chair creaking.

‘Uhn?’ said Michael, resettling himself and tilting back in his captain’s chair. I repeated the question. Time leaked through my fingers.

‘Sierra Leone,’ said Michel, while I tried to remember the question. He handed back the joint. I waved it away. He insisted.

‘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?’

‘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.