Red Tape and White Knuckles by Lois Pryce

Author:Lois Pryce [Lois Pryce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2009-05-02T00:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

IF THE AMOUNT of sweat generated was anything to go by, the next couple of days were quite productive as I scuttled around town between the Holiday Inn and the Botanical Gardens, trying to broker meetings between Jane and Charles, these two strangers who had suddenly loomed large in my life. It wasn’t until Friday afternoon that I remembered that today was E-day, Ekoko’s arrival in Limbe, and sure enough, a call to his mobile prompted the words I never thought I would hear on my trip through Africa: I’ll send my driver to collect you.

A hasty attack with the eyebrow tweezers and a liberal helping of red toenail varnish went some way towards preparing me for an evening with a local dignitary. I had only two sets of clothes: one for riding in, the other for everything else. Neither outfit was very dashing and both had seen plenty of action over the last few months, but I did my best to scrub up, and at the appointed time an immaculately dressed young man arrived in a blacked-out 4 × 4. He greeted me with a small bow and held the rear door open for me to climb inside, while Jane watched agape from behind the reception desk at this turn of events.

Despite having been in Limbe for just a few days, I was already on friendly terms with the family down the road from the hotel that sold tomatoes outside their house, and the old lady at the banana stall next to the Botanical Gardens, and the guy with a plate of watermelon slices on his head who hung out near the petrol station. It wasn’t a big town, and as far as I had seen I was the only white person here; and despite their attachment to English, they still called me La Blanche, the standard nickname for a white woman in Cameroon. But after all my walking around town, working up a sweat, it felt odd to be whisked past these familiar faces in the air-conditioned comfort of a big fancy car on my way to visit a high-flying member of Cameroonian society. And when I remembered my grovelling for visas and begging to be allowed into banks in Yaounde, the whole thing seemed quite absurd. Not that I was complaining; I was happy to take my good times where I found them, but I recalled my silent protest to Charles in the banana trees: I’m a nobody, I don’t have any connections, or influence! Now, a few days later, I was being carted off to the beach house of a member of the Chamber of Commerce! It was a bizarre turn of events, but I marvelled silently at the strange twists and turns of my African adventure.

The driver sped up the coast road for about ten miles before turning off into a village of tumbledown shacks and breezeblock dwellings. He twisted and bumped his way along a series of rutted stony tracks before pulling up at an ornate metal gate set into a high wall.

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