Chasing Mammon by Kennedy Douglas

Author:Kennedy, Douglas [Kennedy, Douglas]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781405511544
Publisher: Abacus
Published: 2011-11-02T16:00:00+00:00

She always had a small rucksack slung over her shoulder, and a red bandana dangling out of the pocket of her denims. She always used salutations like ‘Hey, guys!’ and actually said ‘neat’ when something met her approval. When I first encountered her in 1972, she struck me as the suburban archetype whom my mother would have approvingly dubbed ‘a nice girl’. But I never liked nice girls back then (I had a romantic penchant for willowy cellists or wholesale neurotics who mainlined Sylvia Plath), so I wrote Debbie Shilts off as the perennial good sport: pert, yet enthusiastically ordinaire.

It was, of course, a harsh assessment, and one which I immediately amended when I heard that, shortly after we got our degrees, Debbie had disappeared to Cameroon with the Peace Corps. Nice girls from New Jersey generally didn’t spend two years of their lives teaching English in a tumbledown village on the outskirts of Douala, so the news genuinely intrigued me at the time. But, since Debbie and I didn’t keep in touch, the first time I had a chance to ask her why she’d ventured to Cameroon was fourteen years later, at Ben’s party.

‘You want to hear the story, come on down to the Street,’ she said.

So I did just that, dropping by her office near the Stock Exchange a week later. Debbie worked on the fourteenth floor of one of those anonymous glass and concrete cubes that spread like architectural body lice across the Manhattan cityscape during the sixties. Her office was a small cell-like cubicle constructed out of pre-fab soundproof dividers. It afforded a panoramic view of an air shaft. A slot-in nameplate adorned the door of this and the thirty-two other cubicles stacked back-to-back down a narrow corridor. Each cubicle was furnished with the same wood and steel desk, the same hi-back swivel chair in black fabric, the same grey filing cabinet, the same Apple Macintosh computer. This was the investment brokerage section of a major financial corporation. Debbie had evidently been inducted into its Order of Shoulder Pads, as she was crisply dressed in a navy blue suit and white linen blouse, a blue silk bow neatly adorning its collar. The nice girl in a power corporate uniform.

‘Cameroon must seem far away from all this,’ I said, settling into the client chair facing her desk.

‘Well, it was twelve years ago,’ she said. ‘But, yeah, it does kind of belong to another time – to the point where it’s really like ancient history to me. And whenever I get thinking about those two years, you know what always comes to mind? The light. I could never get over its harshness. That’s the thing which haunts me most about Africa – remembering just how pure the sun was; how it made everything so clear.’

‘Unlike the light in New York?’

Debbie pointed to the air shaft beyond her window. ‘What light?

‘You know, before I got to Cameroon, I had these real stupid visions of Africa being Tarzan-ish. But where

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