He was dressed for the bush in felt hat, shooting jacket, khaki pants and sand boots. One of the girls made a pass at him, a quadroon with a skin like honey and the kind of body that would have had a bishop on his knees. Burke looked through her, not over her, as if she simply didn’t exist, and ordered a drink.
The girl was called Lola and as we’d been more than good friends I felt like telling him he was missing out on a damn good thing, but maybe that was just the whisky talking. In those days I wasn’t too used to it and it was dangerously cheap. When I looked up, he was standing watching, a glass of beer in one hand.
‘You want to lay off that stuff,’ he said as I poured another. ‘It won’t do you any good, not in this climate.’
‘My funeral.’
I suppose that was the right kind of reply for the tough, footloose adventurer I fondly imagined myself to be at that time and I toasted him. He challenged me calmly, his face quite expressionless, and when I raised the glass to my lips it took a real physical effort. The whisky tasted foul. I gagged and put the glass down hurriedly, a hand to my mouth.
His expression didn’t change. ‘The barman tells me you’re English.’
Which was what I thought he was at the time, for his Irish upbringing was indicated more by tricks of speech and phrasing than accent.
I shook my head. ‘American.’
‘You don’t sound like it.’
‘I spent what they term the formative years in Europe.’
He nodded. ‘I don’t suppose you can play “The lark in the clear air”?’
‘As ever was,’ I said, and moved into a reasonably straight rendering of the beautiful old Irish folk song.
It lacked John McCormack, but wasn’t bad though I do say it myself. He nodded soberly when I finished. ‘You’re good-too good for this place.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Is it all right if I smoke?’
‘I’ll tell the barman to send you a beer,’ he replied gravely.
He returned to the bar and a moment later one of Coimbra’s flunkeys tapped him on the shoulder. There was a short conversation and they went upstairs to-gether.
Lola came across, yawning hugely. ‘You’re losing your touch,’ I told her.
‘The Englishman?’ She shrugged. ‘I’ve met his kind before. Half a man. Big in everything except what counts.’
She moved on and I sat there thinking about what she had said, working my way through a slow blues. At that time I was inclined to think she was talking into the wind, probably out of a kind of professional pique at being snubbed. A man didn’t have to be the other thing just because he wasn’t particularly attracted to women, although I’ve never seen any virtue in not in-dulging at every opportunity in what is one of life’s greatest pleasures as far as I’m concerned. The Sicilian half of me discovered women early.
I came to the end of the number I was playing and lit a cigarette. For some reason there was one of those sudden lulls that you sometimes get with a crowd any-where. Everyone seemed to stop talking and the whole thing became curiously dreamlike. It was as if I was outside looking into the packed room and things moved in a kind of slow motion.
What was I doing here on the rim of the dark con-tinent, Africa all around me? Faces everywhere, loom-ing through the smoke, black, white, brown and subtle variations in between, riff-raff, not even a common humanity holding us together, all running from some-thing.
Suddenly I’d had enough. In a way, I’d taken a look, not so much at myself as I was then, but at what I would soon become and I didn’t like what I’d seen. I was hot and sticky, sweat trickling from my armpits, and I decided to change my shirt. I realise now, of course, that I was only looking for some excuse to go upstairs.
My room was on the third floor, Coimbra’s apart-ment on the second, the girls being down below. As a rule it was quiet up there because that was the way Coimbra liked it, but now, as I paused at the end of the passage, I was aware again of that same strange still-ness I had experienced earlier.