II

Zanahary swore blind he knew the best hotel in town; the best at giving backhanders, thought Rebecca, when she saw it. But it was late and she and Daniel were both too tired to go hunting for anything better. What with her father’s Jeep waiting for her back at Eden, she didn’t need a hire car any more, so she thanked Zanahary and signed off on his paperwork. Then she and Daniel followed the concierge upstairs to neighbouring rooms, huge and grey with wire mosquito mesh over the windows, chunks of plaster gouged from the walls, wardrobes with neither drawers nor rails. ‘Fancy something to eat?’ asked Daniel.

‘I need to freshen up first.’ She hoisted her overnight bag on to the double bed. It creaked loudly beneath the modest weight, so she transferred to the single. She could hear Daniel pottering around next door. For some unaccountable reason she remembered how she’d stumbled on the Yvette’s deck earlier, and he’d caught her arm. ‘Careful now,’ he’d said.

Careful now, indeed!

These past few years, she’d grown accustomed to signing the cheques, taking the decisions, being the boss. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d spent a whole day with a man whose help she needed, yet over whom she’d had neither authority nor leverage; and she wasn’t quite sure that she liked it. She took a shower, was drying herself off when Daniel knocked. ‘Ready yet?’ he asked.

‘Another minute.’

‘I’ll be downstairs.’

She spread her clothes out on her bed, wishing she’d given a little more thought to her packing this morning. She put on blue jeans and a ruby T-shirt, then did her make-up. The mirror was cracked and dull, and the light above the sink was infuriating, flickering for an age, then springing on abruptly, before breaking into flickers once more. She went out, locked up. Daniel was on a swing-bench chatting to a Malagasy woman with bleached-blonde hair and a turquoise tracksuit. Even as Rebecca watched, she got up on to her knees on the bench and whispered something in Daniel’s. He laughed and shook his head. She pulled an expression of mock affront then unzipped her tracksuit top, grabbed his hand and pressed it against her breast.

Sensations both hot and cold warred inside Rebecca. The cold ones won. Her heels slapped the bare concrete as she made her way down. ‘Well?’ she asked. ‘Still want something to eat, or have you found something better to do?’

‘This is Mimi,’ said Daniel. ‘I think she likes me.’

‘I’m sure she can be here when we get back, if you ask her nicely.’ It came out more tartly than she’d intended. He raised an amused eyebrow, which for some reason infuriated her. She led the way out of the hotel, waved down a taxi, directed the driver to an old haunt. They took a table on the terrace. ‘Drink?’ asked Daniel.

‘Not for me.’

Daniel went to the bar, returned with a large bottle of Stella Gold, ice-cold and sweating, its label peeling free. He poured them each a glass, offered his in a toast. ‘Your health,’ he said.

‘Don’t drink too much,’ she told him. ‘We’ve got an early start.’

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘That girl was just being friendly.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

A young waitress appeared at their table. She had shiny jet-black skin stretched so tightly over her cheekbones it looked as though someone had poked a straw through the back of her skull and sucked all the air out. She took their orders from a distance, as though nervous of touching them by accident. And when she walked between the tables, it was in an apologetic, sideways crouch, one arm in front, one behind, like a figure from an Egyptian tomb painting come to life.

A Malagasy band and dancers began performing. Their music was jangling, primal. Madagascar’s humpback topography meant the only station they could pick up on this coast twenty years ago was Radio Mozambique, so Tulear had developed its own distinctive sound, a blend of Malagasy and African. The men strummed furiously while their women wailed and jiggled their buttocks like jackhammers; press down on their shoulders and you could dig up roads. The crude, overt sexuality of their dance soured Rebecca’s mood even further. There was still no sign of their food. Their waitress finally appeared with a woven basket of baguette slices and a bowl of nuts. Rebecca’s hand hovered above them like a crane-grab in the fairground game, looking for rich studs of salt.

Daniel tore a chunk of white flesh from a baguette, tossed it on to the tiled floor behind her. She turned to look. A ring-tailed lemur was tethered by a long, thin black leash to the limb of a tree. They were delightful creatures, these shrunken kangaroos with their long, hooped black-and-white tails. They had springs in their legs; they bounced all over the place. This one was male; she could tell from the black packet of his crotch. He began bounding up and down with excitement at the sight of the bread, just out of his reach. Daniel got up, walked across, picked up the morsel, held it out. The ring-tail seized it in both forepaws, ate it greedily, then bounced exuberantly for more. Daniel laughed and tore off another piece, crouched low to lure the ring-tail on to his arm, his shoulder and finally on to his head. He looked across at Rebecca and grinned like a schoolboy who’d done something clever.

‘Don’t do that,’ she said.

‘Why not?’

‘Lemurs aren’t domesticated. They’re not pets’

He took the ring-tail off his head, set him down. ‘He seems happy enough.’

‘And how would you know? An expert on Lemur catta, are you?’

‘That’s not exactly—’

‘Ring-tails are social animals,’ said Rebecca. ‘They need their own kind.’ Even to her own ears, her voice sounded unnecessarily strained. She was aware of other diners falling quiet around her, but there was something inside her that had to get out. ‘They need to groom and be groomed. They need their family. They need to be part of a group, not isolated by themselves and tied on strings for the amusement of moron tourists.’

He looked strangely at her as he came to sit back down. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’

‘No,’ she said stiffly. ‘Evidently.’

A forty-year-old tourist with a paunch and thinning brown hair entered the restaurant at that moment, wearing leather trousers and a gaudy shirt, holding hands with a dazzlingly beautiful young Malagasy girl. You found plenty of Europeans like this in Madagascar. They couldn’t hack it back home, so they came out here, taking advantage of the poverty to hire themselves a succession of teen dolls and make out like they were studs. He took the neighbouring table, leaned back in his chair, shouted out for a carafe of red wine in a manner designed to let everyone know he was on cordial terms with the patron. He glanced across at Rebecca, looked her up and down with approval, then threw Daniel a smirk of congratulation, along with an inquisitive little raise of the eyebrow, as if to suggest they might want to try trading sometime.

Daniel sagged visibly in his chair, as though sensing trouble, but Rebecca felt only an icy calm. She said in a deliberately loud voice: ‘Did I ever tell you about the study of sex tourism we did when I was at Oxford?’

The man was clearly startled by her English. He pulled a self-deprecating face to acknowledge and apologise for his gaffe. Rebecca ignored him. ‘It was fascinating,’ she went on. ‘Did you know that men who pay for sex have shorter, thinner penises than normal men? That they masturbate more and earn less. And that they’re more likely to live with their mothers into their thirties.’

‘Come on, Rebecca,’ said Daniel. ‘Let it go.’

She frowned in feigned puzzlement. ‘It’s only a study,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d find it interesting. I’m sure you’d never use whores yourself. You’re not the type, after all. I’m sure that girl at the hotel was just being friendly, like you said. I mean, sex tourists are usually obese, ugly and of subnormal intelligence. And you’re not remotely obese.’

‘For fuck’s sake, Rebecca.’

Their neighbour looked a little sick too. He leaned across, his voice low. ‘I think maybe I make offence,’ he said. ‘I am sorry if this is—’

‘Not at all,’ Rebecca assured him. ‘I’m just telling my friend here about a study I did at university.’ She turned back to Daniel. ‘Where was I? Yes. Did you know that sex tourists are twice as likely to be bald as normal men, and that they suffer disproportionately from premature ejaculation? It’s quite true. And not—as you might think—because they pay by the minute and are too cheap to hold back. No. It’s because they’re socially inadequate, very low-status, I mean full-blown omegas. They usually only ever have the chance for opportunistic sex, when the—’

‘That’s enough,’ said Daniel.

‘—real men are away. Premature ejaculation helps them deposit their sperm and get away before the alpha males return to kick their—’

‘I said that’s enough.’ He grabbed her wrist and squeezed it so tight she flinched and looked at him in surprise. ‘Typical biologist, aren’t you?’ he said softly. ‘Tolerate frailty in every species but your own.’

‘We should know better.’

‘And you do, I suppose. That must feel good.’ He held her a moment longer then let go, sat back in his chair. She could feel her wrist throb where he’d held it, but she didn’t look down, she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. Their food arrived at last. They ate, paid and left without exchanging another word.