by Holly Watt
‘Git.’
‘Shh,’ said the home affairs editor. ‘Can you at least try and hang on until a week on Thursday?’
A thought struck Eric. ‘What day has Sophie gone for?’
The home affairs editor checked his notepad.
‘Three weeks on Friday.’
‘But that’s so … ’ Eric searched for the word, ‘disloyal.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ the home affairs editor consulted his notepad again. ‘All things considered, I’d say that was fairly devoted really.’
‘Arse.’
‘Fancy a bet yourself?’ the home affairs editor asked chummily. ‘There’s still a couple of days available.’
Casey turned back to Miranda. ‘I have to go.’
33
The pickup swerved around a pothole.
‘Sorry,’ Kizzie grinned back at them unrepentantly. ‘Not far now.’
‘You always drove like a lunatic,’ Zac grumbled, clinging to a handle.
They were speeding down a wide street, past sprawling houses just peeking out over high crumbling walls. Wide verges – the patchy grass bleached by the sun – lined the road. The scale of these streets was spacious, generous. Elegant, even. But everywhere, there were signs of disintegration.
A collapsed road sign here, a gate dangling off its hinges there. On one corner, a burned-out house turned blind windows to the world. Jacaranda trees twined overhead, the branches tangling like dreams. In October, they would be a haze of purple, street after street of violet magic. These were the bones of a beautiful city.
‘Welcome to Harare.’ Kizzie dodged another pothole. ‘Welcome to our chaos.’
Casey and Zac had abandoned the English winter for the Zimbabwean summer, stepping out of the plane into a muggy heat. Kizzie had met them at the airport, wrapping Zac in a hug. A doctor at one of the local hospitals, her pass and lanyard still dangled around her neck.
‘Most of these houses have gardens of two or three acres.’ Kizzie pointed, as she accelerated round a man pushing a handcart. ‘And they’re almost all a complete mess. That one there was seized by a government minister for his mistress.’
As Kizzie spoke, she veered to the right, pressing a button on the dashboard as she braked hard in front of tall electric gates. The gates creaked open unwillingly. They had been painted black, once, a long time ago. But the paint had peeled away, showing first a coat of dark green, and then a layer of maroon. On either side of the gates, eight-foot walls looked to be embedded with broken glass, and topped with razor wire.
‘And here is Kewlake,’ said Kizzie, as the car bounced down a narrow track, bushes scraping the paint. ‘Lovely, lovely Kewlake.’
Kizzie parked the car under three huge mahogany trees that soared to the sky. Stepping out of the car was like tripping into an aviary, dozens of birds chirping, warbling, trilling. As Kizzie slammed her car door, an emerald turaco squawked away towards the gates.
The house lay beyond a wide stretch of what must once have been a lawn. Now it was a sea of grasses, layers and shades and ripples of a thousand different greens. The delicate msasa trees hesitated, like ballerinas posing at the end of a dance. To the left, Casey could see a termite nest, six feet high and seething with activity.
‘Be careful that way.’ Kizzie waved to the right. ‘There’s a swimming pool somewhere in the grass. God knows where.’
They walked up a stepping stone path that picked its way through the grasses, studded by giant marigolds. Kewlake itself was a long, low house, peering out from behind a row of cassias, its name in curlicues over the door. A wide verandah, held up by colonial pillars, wrapped itself around the house. The roof sagged.
‘It’s beautiful,’ said Casey.
‘It was, once. My boyfriend’s parents lived here for years,’ Kizzie explained. ‘But they left a decade ago. They just locked it up one day, and headed back to England.’
‘They never sold it?’
‘Property in Harare isn’t worth much,’ said Kizzie. ‘And it’s almost impossible to get capital out of Zimbabwe, anyway. I suppose Oscar’s parents like to think that they might come back one day. They won’t, though.’
Kizzie bounded up shallow steps to the front door, and it opened with a screech. The hall was wide, the ceilings high and cool. There was a smell of cinnamon and mould. Kizzie led them into a drawing room, with huge velvet sofas and lots of heavy brown furniture. Five full-length windows looked out over the wilderness of the garden. Kizzie leaned over and switched on a table lamp, crystal, with a fringed shade.
‘Miss Havisham in the colonies,’ she laughed. ‘Your rooms are down that corridor, by the way.’
‘Thank you,’ said Casey.
‘So.’ Kizzie threw herself into a dusty armchair. ‘Where do you want to start?’
34
Casey had sent Kizzie her research on zentetra before they got on the plane. Now Kizzie sat in front of Casey’s laptop, reading aloud from an old newspaper article.
‘“We are very happy to be able to assist with this shipment,” said a spokesman for Adsero. “We are proud to be able to support millions of refugees during this terrible conflict.”’
‘It’s the quote from the charity that coordinated that cargo,’ said Zac, ‘that really completes it.’
‘“The wonderful thing about this is everyone has done the right thing for unselfish reasons”.’ Kizzie rolled her eyes. ‘“It’s something that everyone should feel good about.”’
‘No mention anywhere,’ Casey said, ‘of tax breaks.’
‘Nope.’
Forced perspective, Casey thought to herself. It was all a question of perspective.
‘I was talking to Professor Jalali about the problems around here with zentetra,’ Kizzie said, pouring glasses of lemonade. ‘I speak to her every so often, run ideas and thoughts past her. I trained under her, like Zac.’
‘And then Jalali called me,’ sighed Zac. ‘I wonder how she got my new number?’
He looked sideways at Casey.
Casey kept her eyes firmly on Kizzie.
After their meeting in Tooting, Professor Jalali had contacted dozens of her former students, talking for hours about developments in antibiotics around the world. When Kizzie mentioned the problems with zentetra and Adsero in Zimbabwe, Jalali had contacted Zac and talked to him about the growing antibiotic resistance crisis.
Zac, Casey guessed, had seen an opportunity to attack Adsero without any reference to Corax – his strange code of honour satisfied – and had agreed to help Casey with the story after Jalali insisted she was far too busy working on an upcoming conference in Sydney.
Jalali, Casey thought, would have made a hell of a journalist.
After the meeting in St Paul’s, it had been fairly easy to convince Zac to fly to Zimbabwe.
‘What else are you going to do?’ Casey had fixed him with a stare. ‘Scoot back to that blonde in the little pink dress?’
‘Good point.’ Zac reached for his phone. ‘I totally forgot to call her.’
‘But what will you actually do on that little rock? While away a lifetime with a bunch of people whose only common denominator is a wish to avoid tax?’
‘It does bring people together, though,’ Zac mused. ‘It really unites them.’
‘What else will you do out there? Bob around on that boat a bit more? Have a few long lunches with Martin?’
‘Martin?’
‘I met him in the yacht club. Dumped his alcoholic wife for the fucking gorgeous Elene?’
‘Oh, Christ, yes, he’s awful. I honestly think I’d rather be gunned down by Adsero’s goons.’
‘This,’ Casey had promised, ‘will be an adventure. Plus you know what you’re looking for, and I don’t.’
‘All right.’ A long sigh. ‘Fine.’
Still avoiding Zac’s eye, Casey leaned forward and took a biscuit. ‘Where’s Oscar at the moment, Kizzie?’
‘Oscar comes and goes, hey?’ Kizzie’s words rose
at the end, turning sentences into questions. ‘There’s basically no point in him working in Zim at the moment, but he goes abroad, works for a bit, comes back again for a while. He’s in Spain right now.’
Zimbabwe had been crippled by decades of disastrous inflation. For a generation – almost two, now – everyone who could get up and go had got up and gone. Almost no one had brought hard currency into Zimbabwe for years, ever since the government started confiscating businesses, houses, farms.
‘So what did you tell Professor Jalali?’ asked Casey. ‘About zentetra?’
‘Well.’ Kizzie jumped to her feet, endlessly energetic. ‘It’s probably easier if I just show you.’
35
It took twenty minutes to drive from Avondale, the elegant old suburb in the north of Harare, to Mbare Musika market in the hectic south of the city.
As she drove, Kizzie pointed out the local sights. ‘Belgravia, Kensington, Alexandra Park,’ she recited. ‘You recognise all those names, don’t you?’ A quick smile. ‘For years, only white people owned houses in the northern suburbs. And they brought their place names with them.’
Kizzie smiled again. Her skin was dark brown, hair twisted into short braids. She had high cheekbones and a big, generous mouth. Early thirties, Casey guessed, and a naturally buoyant personality, dragging everyone up with her. Able to enjoy life, even when surrounded by tragedy. Not because she lacked compassion, but because she was instinctively, intuitively resilient.
She had an innate glamour too. Even in the dusty pickup, her make-up was immaculate. She was wearing a tea dress, nipped in at the waist, vivid with a red-and-orange butterfly print.
‘And now?’ Zac asked.
‘That’s all changing,’ Kizzie shrugged. ‘The Avondale Curtain may be rising, but everything else is going to shit.’
They passed a petrol station, the queue stretching for a quarter of a mile down the street.
‘They must have managed to get a tanker through from Mozambique,’ Kizzie said. ‘I have to tell Zira. She’s completely out of petrol.’
The men in the queue were pushing their cars slowly down the road towards the station. No one could wait with their engine running, not here.
Kizzie clicked her tongue in disapproval, and then accelerated down the road, shooting past a huge power station that was sitting idle. She cornered hard and pulled the pickup to a halt.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘Mbare.’
The Mbare market was vast, sprawling over several acres. As Casey climbed out of the car, the noise hit her: shouts from the market traders, the blare of music from street stands, the hoot of the car horns. There was a smell of smoke and hot dust and dirt intermingled with a waft of watermelon, a whiff of cabbage. The crowd swirled past in an endless flow of laughter and gossip and bargaining.
In front of Casey, vegetable and fruit traders lined a track, squatting on the ground in the searing heat. One woman was selling a small heap of tomatoes, another, eight bruised mangoes. A man stopped his handcart, piled high with cucumbers, and waited for Casey to move out of the way.
Beyond the small-time traders were rows and rows of the bigger market stalls. These stalls were a scramble of corrugated iron, crumbling breeze block and tattered tarpaulins, all lashed together. Here and there, a tulip tree or a phone mast poked up over the stalls.
Three women bustled past Kizzie’s car, each with a baby tied to her back. A small girl followed a few paces behind the women, a little doll strapped to her back in turn.
As well as being the market, Mbare was Harare’s main bus terminal, and endless dilapidated buses and battle-scarred kombis were inching their way through the chaos of the crowd.
A violet kombi stopped next to Kizzie’s car, and it seemed to Casey as if dozens of people climbed out of the little minibus. Once everyone was out, a pile of luggage almost the size of the kombi was passed out, the biggest bags unstrapped from the roof. ‘No seatbelts’ noted a sticker on the back window. ‘We die like men.’
In quick Shona, Kizzie commandeered a small boy to stand guard over the pickup. ‘He’ll keep an eye on it,’ she said. ‘This way.’
Part of the Mbare market was covered. In other areas, scrappy tarpaulins were tied together in a sort of roof and underneath this it was cooler, and even noisier. Casey, Zac and Kizzie jostled past women bartering over fish and beans and onions, the stallholders cooking over open fires as they waited for business.
There seemed to be little organisation in this market. One stall would be piled high with old mobile phones, the next with dried caterpillars. At a tight bend in the passageway, Casey had to squeeze past two men playing checkers; their checkers were bottle tops, the board painted on to a splintery piece of plywood.
‘Here.’ Kizzie came to an abrupt halt in front of one of the smaller stands. A smiling woman sat behind a table, neat in a turquoise dress and a magenta headscarf. The stall counter was covered in white packets, and Zac jerked in shock. A jumble of drugs, so casual.
Casey forced herself not to stare. At the front of the table, she could make out antacids and painkillers. Behind them were anti-inflammatories and skin-lightening creams. In a creased cardboard box by the woman’s feet, there were antiretrovirals for HIV, and three different types of birth control pills.
And there were antibiotics too.
Piles of them.
Some packets held only a few pills, others dozens of tablets. A few of the cartons had been opened, one or two capsules popped out. Many of the packets were dog-eared, the corners torn. Casey could make out brand names, warning symbols, colourful logos.
Kizzie was talking quickly, joking with the trader in Shona. She held up one packet of painkillers, haggled, then handed over a few bond notes, Zimbabwe’s flimsy, largely useless currency. Next, she picked up a box of antibiotics. Amoxicillin, read the packet: a cheap generic antibiotic that could have been produced anywhere in the world. The woman named the price, and Kizzie handed over the money.
Then Kizzie spoke again. Casey heard the word zentetra.
This time, the woman shook her head, and Casey felt a slump of disappointment. But the vendor began to talk again, pointing down the row of stalls.
‘This way,’ Kizzie said over her shoulder as she walked.
‘Are there any regulations at all?’ asked Casey.
‘The market does get raided every so often,’ said Kizzie. ‘So they can be a bit cautious at times. But they don’t get raided very often, and she says this guy has loads.’
‘They’re not exactly that cautious,’ said Zac. ‘In the UK, you’d need a prescription for almost everything that woman was selling,’ he added to Casey.
‘When I’ve been here before, the traders were keeping empty boxes on the counters,’ said Kizzie. ‘One of the kids would run off to get the drugs as soon as they’ve made a sale. But they’re obviously feeling fairly relaxed at the moment.’
Zac was turning over the box of amoxicillin. Some of the words on the packet were printed in Chinese. ‘It’s so easy,’ he sounded shocked. ‘I can’t believe it’s this easy.’
‘Sure,’ said Kizzie. ‘The usual smuggling route for these drugs is over the Zambezi from Zambia. They bring the boxes across in canoes. But they come from all over the place. The DRC, Tanzania, everywhere. The generics are mostly produced in India or China.’
‘As far as we know,’ said Zac.
‘And we’d have to check that the amoxicillin is actually real,’ said Kizzie. ‘There are fake drugs all over this continent. So you’re giving your kid what you think is Malarone, but then the child drops dead of malaria. They reckon between 30 and 60 per cent of the drugs sold in Africa are fake.’
‘It’s so depressing,’ said Casey.
‘Sure,’ said Kizzie. ‘And, of course, the whole thing is funding organised crime, anyway. Because you invest a hundred bucks in white boxes and whatever random chalk-dust pill you can find, and then those little white boxes can bring in a cool half million.’
; Now they were passing a huge pile of spoiled fruit and vegetables. Small children were digging through the heap, looking for an edible mealie head, a bruised cauliflower.
‘Of course, the other problem with out-of-date antibiotics,’ Kizzie carried on, ‘is that they start to degrade. So people are getting a lower dose of the antibiotic than they think, and that makes it’s even easier for the bacteria to bounce back.’
‘Having learned how to resist that particular antibiotic,’ said Zac flatly. ‘It’s a system basically designed to create resistance. And we still think it’s someone else’s problem.’
They could see another stall, this one also piled high with small white boxes.
‘You wait here,’ Kizzie ordered, and Zac and Casey stopped, examining a stall of small toys made from chopped-up drinks cans.
Kizzie was back within minutes, carrying three packets of zentetra. The boxes had the neat Adsero logo bold on the carton.
‘He had loads of it,’ Kizzie said bleakly. ‘He had piles of the bloody stuff.’
‘The thing is,’ Kizzie said, as she led the way back towards the car, ‘if your son is ill, and you can’t afford to take him to a clinic because it’s five bucks to see the doctor, and you’re living off the proceeds of selling six mangoes a day anyway, then – sure – you’re going to be buying antibiotics off a market stall in Mbare. Ndatenda.’ This to the small boy waiting patiently by the pickup. ‘At least the car is still here.’
‘I know,’ said Casey. ‘Anyone would do the same.’
‘One of Professor Jalali’s colleagues was working for an NGO in Mozambique after those floods,’ said Kizzie. ‘She saw the zentetra arriving there. Truckfuls.’
‘All paid for by the taxpayer,’ said Zac.
‘It wasn’t hidden,’ said Casey. ‘Adsero announced the fact they were sending it out there, for heaven’s sake. Their PR team put out press releases, the whole thing.’
‘Hidden in plain sight,’ said Zac.
‘Yes.’