I have no present plan for movement, no intention other than staying here, where everyone is white and strange. I’m stuck. Poor Solzhenitsyn also hid out here, the locals in the store tell me, lived somewhere up the road. Migrant sub-group number three: unwilling political exiles. They also tell me that when he went home to Russia, he wasn’t wanted, which seemed like a warning to me not to fail to love them in Vermont.
So, according to Gabrielle’s letter, the BCCI in Queensway has been replaced by a Cullen’s high-priced grocery. While I have been immobile, Bayswater, like Zanzibar, has moved on without me. First Whiteley’s and now the BCCI. This was my branch of the bank, the one that was opened at the same time that Adnam opened my account for the house conversion. It extended my regular walks: Hereford Road—Le Cafe—Porchester Baths—BCCI. The backbone of my Bayswater life. It was an obvious expansion for the BCCI, convenient to rich Arabs and Asians, opposite the Golden Horseshoe Casino.
In those days I was nervous and intoxicated, my mind entirely on the house conversion. The amount of money seemed enormous to me at the time, and the days were filled with additional thrills: the thrill of telling gangs of men what to do; of seeing a big building taken apart and reassembled at my bidding—walls smashed, a staircase ripped out; of blue architectural plans; of writing cheques; of calculating how much we would make. I jumped out of bed in the mornings and at night I lay awake, anxiously running through the details in my mind. There was nothing beyond getting this done, pulling it off.
Benji knew contractors of every sort, or knew people who knew them, and I saw that he was right again: contacts were everything. I was on the phone, in demand, short of time, exhausted, worried, blessedly busy. I decided that I had never been right for the slowness of Zanzibar or Dar, where we had to turn gossip into an art just to make ourselves a life. Benji listened to my worries, calmed me, told me that everything was fine, cuddled me enough nights to make it OK. I told him, certain of it, “I could not do this without you.”
There were problems that caught me by surprise in spite of all my worrying. I received a message instructing me to go to a phone box at a certain time. “Listen carefully,” said the voice when I picked up the phone, “I’m not going to repeat myself. There are several difficulties with your planning application which can result in its rejection. We can make these go away, but it will cost you three thousand pounds.”
Stupid, I said, “To pay for what?”
“To make them go away.” His sharp tone told me I was stupid.
A bribe. I went silent. I was going from being surprised to not being surprised—from London to Zanzibar and back to London again. The voice said, “Did you hear?”
“Yes. It’s too much. We can’t afford that.”
“Three thousand. I will put the phone down.”
“One thousand five hundred. It’s all we can afford.” “All right. Two thousand. Listen. I’ll send a motorcycle messenger to this phone box at three o’clock. Put the money in an envelope and give it to him. Old notes.” “How do I know you will do what you say?”
“You’ve no choice.” He put the phone down.
I called Benji on his car phone. “It’s normal,” he said. “We’ll pay it. You handled it like a pro.”
I called Kamara. The call had been from someone at his council. He said, “I don’t know how those people in planning operate. I think you have to pay if you want your flats.”
“So, we’re in Africa?”
“In fact.”
I paid the money and we had our planning permission within a week.
The other problems were routine. Our Sikh demolition crew was marking time because the new rubbish skip had not been delivered. The carpenters were ready to go and the roofers still hadn’t finished. An inspector threatened to stop us because he said our scaffolding was illegal. A whole crew of brickies and plasterers “did a runner” because they thought the inspector was from social security. The plumber tried to cheat us. I managed things and Benji went to the site to put the contractors straight.
“What did you say to him?” I asked Benji, of the crooked plumber.
“I was very polite. I didn’t raise my voice. I just told him I had been talking to my friends, and gave him the names of every developer who had used him in the last year and every one who was likely to use him next year. They’re all Asians anyway. When I looked at him again, his face was five shades whiter. He knows we’re connected now. He says he’ll throw in some bidets.”
I loved it when Benji was right. We were in balance. Countering my anxious nights, we made love, in balance, at one or another of his temporary homes. I was astride him and wriggling. He was kneeling behind me, pulling my hips back onto him. He was squeezing my nipples between his thumbs and fingers, on the border of too hard. I was finding the places to squeeze him and drive him mad. He was in my hand, in my mouth, my vagina, my anus, my everywhere, my armpit, even. I let myself be filled with him—elusive, evasive Benji. I returned from a death one night—a little death—and saw below me in the moonlight that his eyes were open and he was smiling broadly, the white smile under the dark moustache.
“Stop it. You’re laughing at me.”
“No. I’m just amazed at you, that’s all.”
“Amazed?”
“At your amazing talents.”
I stopped moving and held him still inside me, trying to squeeze and release myself around him. “Can you feel that?”
“Yes,” he said. “But it’s not those talents I meant.”
I worked at turning that smile of his into a grimace, until he flung his arms around me and rolled me underneath him.
“You’re
