The President's Exile by Pauline Melville

Pauline Melville

The President’s Exile

The president walked up the steps to the entrance of the London School of Economics where he had studied as a young man. He wore a calf-length, navy-blue alpaca coat and a fawn cashmere scarf tied neatly, like a cravat, around his neck. Recently he had undergone an operation on his throat and he worried about protecting the vulnerable area from the cold winds of a London winter.

He passed through the swing doors and stood for a moment on the marbled floor of the large entrance hall. It was not term-time and there were few people about. Nobody recognised him. He remained there for a minute or two. The balding man at the porter’s desk was looking down at some list or other and paid him no attention. He hesitated for a moment wondering what he should say if asked what he was doing there. He would simply say that he was President Hercules and that he had studied law here some thirty – or, goodness, was it forty – years previously and that he had now returned to take an affectionate walk around the place.

In fact, he had not been happy there. Nobody would recognise him, he knew that. It was too long ago. Nor would they know that he was in exile.

His hand gripped the bottom of the briefcase under his arm more tightly at the recollection of his new and unaccustomed lack of status. It was still unclear to him how it had happened. However hard he tried to remember, the precise sequence of events escaped him. The transition from real president to exiled president remained a blur. The more he sat in his hotel room and tried to remember, the more it slipped from his grasp. He wondered whether he might not be in the throes of a nervous breakdown.

He remembered entering the hospital for minor throat surgery. The limousine had delivered him to the front doors where a team of Cuban doctors waited to greet him. The sun was blazing down. He remembered the warm wind on his cheeks. Photographers took pictures of him shaking hands with the surgeons before going inside. After that, he remembered nothing.

The president was standing staring at the floor when he realised that by remaining motionless he would attract attention. He walked over to the lift. Inside he randomly pressed a button. He could not remember which floor housed the law faculty and anyway it had probably all changed. But stepping out of the lift on the third floor, he felt a familiar sense of unease as he recognised the shabby corridors and the warm smell of dull, wooden doors and cheap furniture polish. Notices on various offices indicated that this was now the social anthropology department. But it was certainly the same floor that had once housed the department of legal studies.

He looked through the small window in the door of one of the rooms, cupping his hand to shade his eyes from the reflection. The long, solid desks were the same ones he remembered but now each desk supported a row of grey computers. He tried the door. It was locked. He stared through the window.

Why had he felt drawn to visit this place again? There had, after all, been enough successes in his life. Why, he wondered, should he feel compelled to return to where he had suffered an unforgettable, if minor, humiliation. He recalled the episode.

His tutor had waved his essay in front of the rest of the seminar group and then handed it back to him with the words:

‘This is remarkably like an essay from one of the current third-year students that I marked last year. I shall give you the benefit of the doubt this time but I warn you that if anything similar occurs again I shall report it to the dean.’

Naturally, he had feigned surprise and looked mystified, although he had, in fact, copied the essay from the student whose effort had been marked with an alpha plus. His own work was of a reasonably high standard but it was the certainty of obtaining the best grade that he had been unable to resist.

That same evening, a group of colonial students at the Mecklenberg Square hostel listened and sympathised as he insisted with righteous indignation, over the evening meal of chops and gravy, that the similarity between the essays had been an extraordinary and unfortunate coincidence. He talked scathingly of his tutor whom, he said, undoubtedly shared the racial bias common to all colonial masters and just wanted to see him degraded.

Several of the students from that batch at Mecklenberg Square had gone on to do well in later life. Two were currently prime ministers of African states. One had gone to Sandhurst Military Academy and was now a general in Ghana. He himself had become the first black president in South America.

He prided himself on the fact that he was one of the few presidents on that continent who could mix and feel at ease with the crowd in the marketplace. Sometimes he would order his driver to stop the car at one of the street markets so that he could walk amongst the pungent smells of vegetables, herbs, washing powders and cocoa beans or stroll between the stiff carcasses of dried fish, to talk and joke with the stall-holders and ask them about business. In his speeches he often referred to the importance of ‘the small man’.

It was the same on open days at his official residence. He enjoyed the bonhomie, mingling with people in the grounds, chatting, gesticulating and jostling his way through the guests as those around him closed in and clapped him on the back.

But when he was out of the country, officiating as head of state at some international conference and he bumped into his former fellow students, he fretted over whether any of them remembered the time that he was accused of cheating and the public smile froze on his face.

The odd thing was that even after he had been president for many years, he felt unsure of his position. He felt like a charlatan. And this was nothing to do with the rigged elections that had kept him in power for nearly two decades. He would have felt like a charlatan even if he had been fairly elected.

His father, a civil servant, had once told him he would never amount to anything because he lacked moral fibre. The office of president felt like a carapace he had assumed to cover his failings. The only question he ever really wanted to ask his fellow presidents and prime ministers at those conferences was whether they felt the same.

‘Do you feel too that we’re all a bunch of frauds?’ he wanted to ask, but never did.

He turned away from the seminar room and walked down the corridor back towards the lift. He inspected his Cartier watch. Quarter-past eleven. He had nowhere particular to go and for some reason felt reluctant to leave the building straight away.

He abandoned the lift on the ground floor and made his way to the Old Theatre. This was where important visiting lecturers delivered their addresses. Nobody paid heed to him and he walked over to the door on the right and slipped quietly inside.

Here things had changed. The auditorium was at the same raked angle as he remembered but instead of the parquet flooring and banks of gloomy, high-backed, oak seats, the entire place had been carpeted and the wooden benches replaced by plush and comfortable seats like a real theatre.

There was no one there. A microphone stand, an empty glass and dusty jug of water stood on a table on the stage awaiting some phantom speaker. The president sank into one of the upholstered chairs with relief and put his briefcase down on the seat next to him. He loosened the scarf round his neck gingerly

. The operation wound on his throat had not healed properly. Sometimes it oozed a colourless fluid. He touched the ridged scar gently with his fingertips. They came away a little wet. He searched for a handkerchief in his coat pocket and held it against the places where the seeping plasma escaped.

Anxious to put out of his mind the unpleasant memories occasioned by his visit upstairs, he tried to console himself by re-living the time when he had won the Best Speaker’s Prize for oratory at the Inns of Court. But all he could remember was how he had felt at the time – a sense of incredulity that the judges should reward him for something that was so easy, telling lies in a powerful and persuasive manner. He could barely see the credit in that because even as a child he had recognised the distinction between public lies and private truths. He thought it was second nature to everyone. What was oratory if not the art of public lies? For him, all discourse was to some extent a matter of lying.

Lying had never been a problem. It is easy for those with a good grasp of reality. The same sound grasp of reality made him a pragmatic politician.

‘It is simple,’ he had said in the early days of his political life. ‘I am the African leader. My rival is the East Indian leader.’ He would say this quite openly when most of the progressive forces in the fifties supported his rival whom they understood to be leader of the masses. His rival campaigned up and down the country on the basis of racial unity. Meanwhile, he negotiated with the Americans and British and took power knowing he would be able to rely on people to vote on the basis of racial division.

‘I deal with realities,’ he said.

And it was this that made his present position so disturbing. He was not sure exactly what the reality was. If he knew the events that had led him here, he would know what to do about his current situation. But he seemed to have difficulty in concentrating. He leaned forward in his seat and clenched his fists together, head between his hands. The important matters were vague, yet other irritating and inconsequential memories such as the tutor accusing him of cheating all those years ago remained vividly in his mind.

Feeling a little hot, he opened the top buttons of his coat. For some reason his thoughts travelled back to the occasion when his father had compared him unfavourably to one of his schoolfriends, a certain Michael Yates. He was eleven. He had arrived home from school to find his father standing on the polished floor in front of the open verandah doors, scowling over a letter from his headmaster. It concerned some minor misdemeanour. It was not the misdemeanour that the headmaster complained of, however, but the disproportionate and elaborate web of lies and deception that had been fabricated to cover it up.

‘You shame me,’ his father had roared while his sister looked on with satisfaction from beside the dresser. ‘Why you can’t be like Michael Yates? Michael Yates is open and honest. Michael Yates is a straightforward boy. You sneaky. Why do I have to have a lampey-pampey sneak for a son?’

Years later, as president, when he was about to make a speech at the Critchlow Labour College, he spotted a familiar figure as he made his way down the aisle to the rostrum. These were the days when he had begun to wear an item of purple every day and to sign his name in purple ink like an emperor. He stopped to shake the hand of his old friend from schooldays, whose hair was now thinning on either side of a peak at the front and who beamed at him from the sidelines.

‘Michael Yates. What are you up to these days?’

‘I’m teaching in the secondary school at West Ruimveldt.’

The president slapped him on the back.

‘Pleased to hear it,’ he said, before continuing down to the platform.

That afternoon, the president arrived back at his office and told his secretary to ensure forthwith that a Mr Michael Yates was sacked from his post at West Ruimveldt secondary school and refused a post anywhere else. For the rest of the morning he basked in the satisfaction of an ancient score settled. President Hercules had a phenomenal memory for slights. He could remember any politician who had offended or opposed him and the precise details of the occasion.

A cleaner bumped the doors of the theatre open with her behind and entered backwards dragging a hoover. The president gathered up his belongings and edged between the rows of seats towards the exit.

He found himself in Kingsway. He looked briefly for a restaurant he used to frequent but it was no longer there. It had been replaced by a print and graphics store.

The traffic streamed past him down towards Bush House. In a gap between two buildings opposite stood a beech tree, its delicate branches traced like a frozen neurone against the blank January sky. Missing the heat and humidity of his own country, he turned and walked in the other direction, away from Kingsway, down the Strand.

There was no doubt that this exile was a temporary state of affairs. He would return eventually. When, was the question. He turned into Northumberland Avenue.

The heavy, revolving doors of the building that housed the Royal Commonwealth Society decanted him slowly through and he was relieved to feel the burst of warmth as he entered. A uniformed security official trod silently across a sea of red carpet, presumably to ask him his business. President Hercules took the man by the elbow across to where a photographic portrait of the Queen and the Commonwealth heads of state hung on the wall. He pointed out his own picture in the line-up and laughed off the man’s embarrassment, tapping him lightly on the back to show that no offence was taken.

The security man looked confused and apologetic as he returned to his position. The president took the lift to the first floor. He seemed bound by a compulsion to return to the scenes of episodes in his life which had shamed or demeaned him in some way. He could not stay away. It was as if, by returning and concentrating with all his energy on these episodes, he might be able to expunge them from history. And yet they were all minor setbacks compared to his achievements. Why did his achievements mean nothing?

In the lift he began to sweat as he remembered in detail what had happened there.

The incident had taken place when he had already been prime minister for several years and had just appointed himself president for life. He had stopped off in London on his return journey from the Commonwealth Conference in Lagos. The meeting he had chosen to address was not a public one but one by private invitation only. He must have had something of a premonition because he had left specific instructions that his sister was not to be invited. On his accession to the presidency, he had cancelled her diplomatic post in an act of private spite after she refused him a small piece of sculpture that their father had left her in his will. She had remained in London and he knew that his action still rankled with her. He did not want to see her in public lest she caused a fuss about it.

His sister, however, had persuaded a friend to bring her along as a guest. The president was relaxed and in good form. He wore an immaculate khaki shirt-jack that sloped gently out from his chest to accommodate the foothills of what was later to become a mountainous waist.

As his speech finished to a round of applause, he stepped forward to shake hands, first with the High Commissioner, then with other selected dignitaries and party supporters. At that precise moment, his sister stepped out of the lift into the foyer on the first floor where the small but distinguished audience milled about holding glasses of wine and chatting.

‘I will probably get into trouble for this, but I should like you all to know certain things about my brother, Baldwin Hercules.’ She spoke in an uncertain voice, but her feet were planted firmly apart and she held her handbag in both trembling hands.

The gathering grew uneasily silent as she stood nervously in front of the lift doors, her head thrown back a little. She continued determinedly, looking straight into the eyes of her audience.

‘Nobody knows a man better than his own sister. Baldwin is a liar, a cheat and a bully. As a child, he always lied his way out of trouble. Lied. Lied. Lied. He always had to blame somebody else. He wanted to win everything. Yes, he is clever, but he has a cruel streak. And I am warning you. You have let him have too much power. You all will suffer for it and so will the country. There is nothing he will not do and nobody he will not use to get what he wants.’

A couple of people moved forwards to try and persuade her gently to leave. One of them pressed the button to open the lift doors behind her. Nothing happened. The lift had stuck. She continued, speaking more quickly now because she sensed that his security guards might bundle her out.

‘Somebody has to speak the truth before it is too late. We all know that elections are rigged. We must be the only country where the government is elected by the dead. Half the names on the lists are taken from tombstones. Eventually, he will kill to stay where he is. Socialist republic?’ She sneered. ‘Ask him why his daughter had to take up residence in Switzerland. I will tell you why – to caretake his secret bank accounts.’

She turned her troubled eyes to the friend who had brought her there as a guest.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have done this. But I couldn’t help it.’ And she turned away from the lift and walked in silence down the carpeted stairs.

That night she took a flight to Canada.

During most of her outburst the president stood silent, an embarrassed smile on his face, his cheeks crawling with horror. When she mentioned the Swiss bank accounts, he turned away and began to speak with an air of amused resignation to one of his entourage.

‘A pity you can’t sack your family in the same way you can sack your ministers,’ he said ruefully, attempting to laugh the whole thing off. Sweat glistened in the creases of his neck. The man he addressed responded with a bray of palpably false laughter.

Now the exiled president walked softly to the place where he had stood all those years ago. He stood in exactly the same spot on the carpet as if he were once again facing his sister, surrounded by phantom dignitaries. Prickles ran up his neck and along his jaw. He rubbed the thumb of his right hand against the middle finger nervously. He could hear once again every word she said and he shuddered as though his soul were being branded.

He had never taken retaliatory action against his sister for the simple reason that he never thought he could get away with it. She lived in Canada. If she had returned to her own country it would have been different. She would have been within his orbit.

Standing there in those gracious surroundings, he recalled the successful assassination of one of his political opponents. The man was a popular radical who posed him a considerable threat. He recollected the man’s death with perfect equanimity and with a sense of satisfaction. He had no reservations about the use of power. Power must be used ruthlessly to be effective. He had never suffered a moment’s regret about the murder. In fact, he considered it to be one of his most subtle triumphs.

The assassination had pleased him because there had been no need for him to do more than express a desire that the man did not exist. He had flung a newspaper down on the table at a ministerial meeting, groaned with mock theatricality and wished out loud that the radical could be stopped from holding these mass meetings at which he made inflammatory statements. Although it was not the meetings that had infuriated him. It was the fact that the young man had referred to him in public as King Kong. He then scribbled down a list of eleven names of those he considered to be potentially dangerous. The revolutionary’s name headed the list.

‘Here is a cricket team that is not batting on our side.’ He had looked around the circle of watchful eyes and shrugged with exaggerated regret. ‘The captain is one I could do without.’

A few weeks later, the man was blown apart in his own car and he, the president, had been able to say, with his hand on his heart, that he knew nothing about it. Although it irritated him to find out that, in a fit of overzealousness, one of his ministers had issued a statement to the press disclaiming all responsibility for the death before it had actually occurred.

By that time, of course, his henchmen knew how to fulfil his slightest whim. His diet, for instance. He began the day by drinking half a beer mug of orange juice with two raw eggs cracked in it, whisked around with port wine to form a greyish-purple liquid. It was a longevity diet. Occasionally, he swallowed a turtle’s heart while it was still beating so that he could absorb the power of life.

Remembering his opponent’s violent demise raised his spirits a little. The knowledge that he had got away with it afforded him some relief from the burning and shameful memory of his sister’s denunciation. He pulled up his coat collar, making sure his throat was well protected from the icy weather, then walked slowly down the stairs and nodded politely to the attendant before shouldering his way through the revolving doors and out into the cold once more.

This time he took a bus to the High Commission. He wanted to find out whether his portrait was still hanging there. He screwed up his face a little. Something about those airbrushed official portraits always made him look a little prissy – the cheeks too plump; the thin moustache resting on his full top lip and short, greying beard on the point of his chin gave him the somewhat pampered look of a man both smug and guarded, possibly a little shy. But it would reassure him to see the picture still hanging there on the wall. He would take one more look before returning to his hotel.

He walked past the red-brick, bay-windowed building several times. The portrait was gone. It was no longer there. His stomach muscles tightened with anxiety. As he watched they were replacing it with his successor. The solemn face of his deputy prime minister, bumbling Edwin Jeffson, was being hoisted into position.

He stood in a daze in the street. A small cockney boy, his face marbled with cold, ran past the railings twanging them with a stick. The noise brought him to his senses. There was nothing to do but return immediately to his hotel. He still suffered fits of dizziness. Clearly, he was not fully recovered from the operation. He should go and lie down and try to work out how to return as quickly as possible before his position became irreversible.

The functional anonymity of the hotel room helped settle his jangled nerves. He lay down stiffly on the bed without removing his overcoat. The trouble was, these patches of fog in his mind. He wondered if they were some unforeseen side-effect of the operation. He could remember more or less everything up until then.

For a moment he wondered whether Castro had sent a team of doctors to incapacitate him as part of some take-over bid. Unlikely. And if that were the case, why was the portrait of his deputy prime minister, Edwin Jeffson, hanging in the High Commission? Jeffson was a born subordinate. He could not imagine Jeffson being behind any plot to oust him. That was why he had appointed him as his deputy.

Wrack his brains as he might, he had no idea how he had arrived in London. Could he have been drugged?

Perhaps he had done something terrible when he was still under the influence of the anaesthetic – made a fool of himself in some way and been discreetly removed for a while. A military take-over was unlikely. The generals and brigadiers were in his pocket. Although, of course, you could never be certain. What kept troubling him was the idea that he might have suffered some kind of mental breakdown.

He frowned. Suddenly he had remembered his horse. He hoped Jason the groom would care for it properly in his absence. He loved to ride his great white steed arrayed in the splendid leather saddle and harness presented to him by President Lyndon Johnson of the United States. Villagers became used to the sight of him walking the horse between Belfield and Golden Grove. His favourite official portrait showed him mounted in the saddle.

One thing he did know for sure. He should return soon. It would not be wise to wait for too long. He did not want Edwin Jeffson to become accustomed to the trappings of office.

Some stains on the scarf that lay beside him on the bed caught his attention. He put his hand to his neck. When he inspected his fingers, he saw that the fluid was a pale pink colour as if there were traces of blood in it. He went into the bathroom, but dazzled by the white tiles and brilliant lights he became suddenly fearful of looking at the wound in the mirror. He stepped hastily back into his room.

Before he slept, he worried briefly about running out of money. But there was always his watch and the gold signet ring. Back home he had encouraged people to kneel and kiss this ring, pretending always that it was a huge joke, but not liking it when people demurred. He could always ask for money to be telegraphed through to him from his Swiss account.

The next morning, he decided to brave the icy drizzle and do something that his official position had never allowed him to do before. He decided to visit Madame Tussaud’s. The idea of a hall of notoriety for both the famous and the infamous had always fascinated him. On arrival, he had no choice but to queue in the freezing sleet along with the other visitors in the Marylebone Road. When he came out two hours later, in contrast to the eminent waxworks, secure and almost complacent in their fixed history, he was overcome by anxiety and paced up and down the Inner Circle of Regent’s Park, going nowhere. It was then he decided that he would return to his own country the next day, secretly, via Surinam.

In his homeland, the president’s official residence had remained empty since his departure, but the lights were still left on there at night to allay the fears of the populace. The attractive, rambling building stood in its own grounds, surrounded by royal palms, and clearly visible from the road.

The house was uninhabited. Maids and cleaners attended to their duties as infrequently as possible. Nobody wanted to go there. Even relatives had gone in only briefly to collect their belongings and scurry away.

There were reports that his white horse had been heard moving slowly about in the spacious galleries upstairs. Nobody was sure he was gone for good. The story also gained ground that a black cayman had been seen slithering down the front steps of the residence. On reaching the ground, the creature had stood up in the shape of a man. To cap it all, one of the ex-maids had apparently started to speak with the president’s voice.

A storekeeper from the village of Vigilance recounted his dream to anyone who would listen:

‘One day I was walking out on to the street. Gradually, I notice many people standing on either side of the road in small groups and knots, kind of muttering and whispering amongst themselves. As I proceeded, the groups became silent and everybody stood looking backwards down the road towards Belfield. A hearse was coming down the road. President Hercules was sitting in it. He shouted out to a man on the roadside in his usual, loudmouth way, “That business with the house – it fix?”

‘The man said no.

“Stop by my house tomorrow. I see to it.”

‘And suddenly the hearse jerked and veered to the left.’ The storekeeper leaned over the counter to his customers. ‘A burial place should be near a fork in the road, you know, so that the funeral party can make a sudden turn and confuse the spirits. So the African legend goes.’ The dream had so impressed him that he continued telling it to each new customer.

‘Then I dreamed I found myself near a small church. A priest stood with a baby in his arms as if for a christening. The baby had the face of an old man – sinister. Gradually, I see who the face belong to. It belong to Hercules. I asked my uncle what music was playing.

“The Dead March”, replied my uncle.

‘And then, you know how it is with dreams, I was at home once more in Vigilance looking out of the window. The whole area was flooded for as far as I could see. The water reached right up to the top windows. Then it began to ebb and recede like mist until it was gone.’

The whole country abounded with rumours and hearsay. There were rumours that President Hercules had been seen in Moscow, in the United States, and now it was even being said that he had been seen standing amongst the waxworks at Madame Tussaud’s.

It was at just this time, when such rumours were at their height, that the president contrived to return incognito. The whole operation was clandestine. He wanted to get back into his own country secretly and assess the situation. It was best to stay out of the capital where his face was too well known. He would spend time in the interior where there would be less chance of his being recognised.

It was a warm, voluptuous night when the president once again felt the soil of his own land under his feet.

The first night of his return he stayed in a disused hut on an abandoned trail outside Orealla. For most of the night he sat in the pitch dark, on a rough wooden plank, planning what to do. Every so often he fingered his neck gingerly. All night long his ring finger itched and he worried that he was developing a nervous allergy.

It would have been more sensible to travel at night when there was less chance of recognition but he was not accustomed to the bush and feared losing himself. Transportation was clearly going to pose a problem. Regretfully, he decided he must risk going into the capital to fetch his horse.

Early the next morning, he set off. A storm helped him. He took a lift in a donkey cart. The tropical deluge turned the air grey and allowed him to pull the hood of his green military cape down so that it nearly covered his face. Worst of all was the fear that he had begun to smell. He had not been able to wash properly since leaving England and in this climate, he feared that the wound in his neck would become putrid.

By nightfall of the next evening he had reached the outskirts of the city.

It was a clear night. The presidential mansion was open, unguarded and with the lights blazing as usual from the deserted rooms. He walked down the path, through the door and up the steps directly facing him. It was just as he had last seen it except that all signs of his occupancy, his personal belongings and effects had been removed. He walked through every room, his footsteps making a hollow echo on the shiny wooden floors, polished to translucence. He breathed deeply. Then he went out and stood for a while on the verandah, looking out towards the statue of a heroic slave leader who had led a rebellion in the eighteenth century.

He could just make out the figure of the statue. Even in the dark there was something bleak about the empty, treeless space surrounding it. In the daytime, traffic swirled round the plinth at a distance. Few people went close up to it. Some said that it possessed a force that pushed people away. Others said that the statue had an intimate connection with the president through magical and arcane writings on the back of its head and that they would never be sure that the president had gone for good until the statue fell.

For a while, he looked out over the city and brooded on what to do next.

As he stepped back inside, a violent snuffling, snorting noise from the next room startled him. He tiptoed along the verandah back to the main reception room.

Standing there, head lowered, eyes looking at him, was his white horse. He rushed over to greet it, grasping it by the mane and burying his head it the animal’s neck. He ran his hand down the horse’s flanks. They felt hot and sweaty as though it had recently been ridden. He cursed the groom for not attending properly to the animal which was still steaming with heat. It had not even been unsaddled. On its back sat the magnificent, tooled leather saddle donated by the United States of America and normally used only on state occasions. The president hurried into the next room to see if there was any sign of his purple riding boots. No trace of them. He came thoughtfully back to where the horse waited.

And then, President Hercules mounted his horse. His head reached nearly to the crystal chandelier. The tops of the landscapes and portraits hanging on the walls came level with his shoulders. He moved the horse slowly through the room and after a little persuasion, the white charger edged itself sideways and awkwardly, with clattering hooves, descended the main stairway.

Horse and rider walked through the main doors of the house, down the path, past the unoccupied guard-hut on the left, past the ghostly trunks of the giant royal palms and out into the sleeping city.

He could not resist it. It was three o’clock in the morning. He took a tour. The city was deserted. He rode past the parliament building. There was a slight drizzle and a chill bite to the air.

‘Cold. Cold,’ he said to himself. ‘Ice-cart coming.’

He cantered on through the empty streets, the horse’s hooves throwing up spray from the waterlogged ground. For nostalgia’s sake, he took the road past one particular house. It was one of the enormous old colonial, white wooden houses. The Demerara shutters opened on to the night. Once his father had taken him to this house, explaining that it represented the soul of the country and all that was good in it. He dallied there for a while, almost wistfully, while the horse cropped the grass at the roadside. Then he moved on.

Dawn came with long streaks in the sky of indigo, grey and pink. Needing to remain unseen, the president spurred his horse into action and galloped between the sleeping villages along the highway out of the city.

In the half-light, he looked down and noticed that the horse’s white mane had become dark in places. He put his hand out and touched one of the patches. It was damp. He put his finger to his mouth. Blood. The blood tasted like iron on his lips. He lifted his hand to feel the bandages on his neck. They were sodden. Despite the continuous loss of blood, there was no pain and he did not feel dizzy or faint.

He decided to stick to his original plan and galvanised the horse into a gallop once more. Soon there should be a turning that led to the Arawak village of Hicuri in the bush. It was not signposted but he thought he could recognise it. If he hid somewhere near there, he could seek help should it become necessary.

He turned down the small track that branched off the main highway. The horse picked its way through the puddles and lakes of the flooded savannah. Feeling too visible in the open country now that it was nearly daylight, the president left the wide trail with its sandy, rutted tracks and guided his horse across a patch of scrub towards the forest stretching away to his left.

Once under cover of the trees, he relaxed. There was a faint trail and he let the horse pick its own way through the stinging insects and slashing grasses. Not much light penetrated. The morning was humid. Sometimes he ducked to avoid tangled vines and lianas slapping him in the face. The horse stopped

every now and then to chomp noisily on wild vegetation. After a while, they came to a place where the trees thinned out and the horse could wander more freely. Exhausted, the president fell into a profound sleep in the saddle.

The captain of Hicuri village was drunk as usual. Even so, he had managed to go into town and persuade the only man he knew who could mend televisions to accompany him back out to the village. The contraption he drove was a cross between Stephenson’s Rocket engine, a tractor and a guillotine cart. The video technician, a scrawny East Indian with a straggly moustache, stood in the back. His leg was encased in plaster from ankle to thigh. Every time the vehicle jolted on the pitted red road that led to Hicuri, the man screeched with pain: ‘Ooouw.’

The only other passenger returning to his village was a young Lokono Arawak called Calvin. Calvin had been working on the dredgers up on the Potaro River when he contracted malaria and had to be sent home. Now he shivered in the back, wracked with fits of icy fever and nausea.

It was Calvin who pointed out the trail of blood leading to the forest. The captain did not stop.

‘You seein’ ning-ning,’ he shouted over his shoulder, thinking that Calvin was suffering the delusions that sometimes come with malaria. He himself, these days, often saw crystal balls and beetles.

In the village, the technician worked for an hour. When the villagers heard the generator start up, they began to gather under the open-sided palm-thatch shelter which housed the television and video machine. Old and young, everybody came walking across the grey sand, even Calvin, a towel wrapped round his waist and so weak that he had to lean against the shed post for support. They sat in rows on benches. Overhead, a parrot chattered non-stop in the scolding voice of an old woman.

The screen flickered and applause broke out. The technician inserted the video which he had brought with him to test the machine. He was proud of the video.

The whole country had been taken by surprise at the death of President Hercules the week before. He had gone into hospital for minor surgery and died under the anaesthetic. The Cuban doctors struggled to save his life, but to no avail. The technician had opportunistically jumped at the chance of videoing the funeral and hoped to sell the film. It was while he was running home to view it that he had broken his leg.

The state funeral of President Baldwin Hercules had taken place a week after his death and the day before the technician’s visit to Hicuri.

The video opened with a blurry and confused shot of the funeral cortège. The gun carriage with the body, drawn by the president’s own sweating white horse, was hurtling down Camp Street in the middle of a thunderstorm with people running alongside to keep up. Curious onlookers stood in the street, ducking the rain, some with newspapers covering their heads, others with umbrellas. Some just stood and stared as if something unpleasant was passing.

By all accounts, the body had suffered from the frequent power cuts while it was in the mortuary freezer. At one point, the mortuary assistants had taken it out and hung it upside-down in the local abattoir. Nor was the preservation of the corpse helped by the fact that one of the employees at the morgue had been found drunk on the embalming fluid. Haste was necessary if those attending the funeral were not to be overcome by the stench. The coffin was jolted so violently that both of the purple boots, emblem of the fallen warrior, had been tossed from the top into the street.

Then a sort of blizzard hit the screen. The villagers waited patiently while the technician explained that there was a gap in the video because he had had to make his way to the sepulchre for the rest of the ceremony.

The film came back on. Watching intently, the villagers saw the coffin being placed on the catafalque.

It was only when the solemn face of Edwin Jeffson appeared on the screen in close-up, giving the funeral oration with tears streaming down his face, that the Lokono Arawak villagers of Hicuri exploded spontaneously into howls of laughter. The more he wept, the more they laughed. They screeched and clutched each other, helpless with mirth, as each politician in turn was shown dabbing his or her eyes solemnly with a handkerchief and throwing flowers reverently on to the coffin. A wild hilarity swept through the whole village.

The sound of the laughter carried right out of Hicuri village, over the creek and into the far side of the forest where the white horse continued to put his head down and forage for grass. His ears twitched at the distant laughter. He ambled to the other side of the clearing, the revenant still asleep on his back. There, beneath the trees, the horse continued to graze patiently, until such time as his sleeping burden should wake again.