Mimi's Ghost by Tim Parks Page B

have had the black with him when he went to see Bobo.
    â€˜Ah, Kwame! All right?’ Morris took the huge meaty arm and squeezed it. There was something wonderfully convincing about the Negro’s mere physical presence.
    Kwame, however, made it clear that all was not right. Then Forbes appeared in a flurry on the steps. ‘Res ipsa loquitur,’ he mysteriously explained. ‘The thing speaks for itself.’
    When Morris just looked blankly at the foggy house, counting the misty statues on the roof (all still there?), Kwame said: ‘It don’t speak, man, it stinks.’
    He was led across the patio to the edge of the terrace, and now Morris became aware of a fierce stench of sewage in the air. Kwame took him by the arm and steered him away from a dark stain on the paving. Looking over the wall which supported the terraced garden above the road, he was shown two long black and clearly unpleasant streaks dribbling down through patches of ivy and capers.
    Morris was upset. As with his own house, no sooner had you got hold of something you’d always wanted than you found all kinds of defects. He was reminded of the roguish builder, a score still unsettled.
    The toilet facilities are unusable,’ Forbes said rather primly, as of one who wanted to make it perfectly clear that he didn’t feel his duties extended in this direction.
    They is overflowing,’ man,’ Kwame said. There is nowhere for us to shit.’
    â€˜And unfortunately we are, urn, without a phone here.’
    Morris paced about the stain where the septic tank must be. Azedine and Farouk came out, the Egyptian boy with a cigarette in his mouth, grimacing and laughing. Certainly the stench was awful, but already Morris’s annoyance was fading. For the fact was that ten or twelve people were standing around waiting for him, Morris Duckworth, to act; a dozen people relying on him, on his munificence, his astuteness in resolving the small practical problems that inevitably kept one on one’s toes in this life. And just as when he sat with the boys by the fire listening to Forbes talking about Palladio and the reinterpretation of the classical, so now, facing the contingency of a clogged septic tank, he felt at home, and what’s more, the head of that household, a role that suited him. He prodded experimentally at a paving stone, as if septic tank diagnosis were one of his many talents. What a long way he had come from the pathetic figure of his childhood, the loner of his youth! In the end, perhaps, it suddenly occurred to him, in the end he might just decide to do without Paola and move in here. That would teach somebody a very big lesson. Doing nothing but watch mtv all day and wanting him to lick yoghurt off her fanny.
    Morris the patriarch (though still childless) went over to his Mercedes, took his address book out of a handsome Gucci bag, found the address of the man they had rented the place from, called him and got the number of a local mason who had apparently reorganised the plumbing some fifteen years before.
    His adoptive family and the ambiguously avuncular Forbes stood in a motley huddle round the car listening to his calls. Really, it was all most gratifying. ‘Sì, subito,’ he insisted, ‘at once.’
    Then they went in to lunch. There was a huge pan of water boiling away on the stove for the pasta, a great brown carrier-bag bulging with bread on the table. Morris placed his own contributions of a kilo of parmesan and two litres of decent Valpolicella beside it. ‘No Trevisan Superiore for us,’ he laughed.
    The windows steamed. Forbes tied aprons round the giggling young Ramiz, the more solemn Farouk, and began to explain about condiments. A wiry little Senegalese with a surprisingly pointed nose and cracked spectacles scrubbed at the wooden table. From the next room came the wail of Azedine’s Moroccan pipes meandering through the kind of tuneless Arab music that has