Last Orders at Harrods

by Michael Holman

  He would make one last effort to investigate it himself, Furniver decided, before admitting defeat, risking embarrassment, and seeking the advice of the doctor recommended by the British high commission, a young woman who looked as if she was barely out of her teens. First he would give his stiffening limbs a fighting chance. He picked up the John D. MacDonald novel he had selected earlier from his bookcase and eased his pink and slightly hairy body into the hot water, laced liberally with bath salts, and immersed himself for a long soak.

  On the scale of life’s concerns, he reflected, his physical discomfort counted for naught; and despite his earlier grim thoughts, the bath restored his confidence. Surely something could be worked out with the lawyers. And as the Kireba People’s Co-operative Bank’s chief executive – indeed, its only executive and its only employee – soaked in the green suds of his bath, and followed the fortunes of Travis McGee, John D. MacDonald’s ace detective and trouble shooter, he began to believe that he was, with Charity Mupanga’s help, within reach of contentment, if not happiness . . .

  10

  “If the snake hisses, the elephant coughs”

  Ntoto looked up at the lowering skies and hurried on to the water pipe that was home to him and Rutere. Halfway to the market he had been forced to turn back, such was the intensity of the storm. Rutere, who had got back before him must have had a productive journey if the pungent sweet smell of rotting bananas that welcomed him was anything to go by. He pulled aside the grimy plastic curtain that covered the entrance. Together with the odour of unwashed boys, old fruit, industrial glue, and a hint of bhang, it made for a well-nigh overpowering combination in the gloomy space.

  Ntoto wrinkled his nose appreciatively.

  “Well done, Rutere.”

  They tucked in. Some of the bananas were so overripe that the boys did not try to peel them. Instead they made a hole with their thumbnails in one blackened end, and enthusiastically sucked out the contents. Those they did not eat were tossed, skin and all, with an occasional handful of sugar which had been “borrowed” from Charity, into a small steel drum, its bubbling mash heated by a fire made out of scavenged pieces of wood and bits of charcoal. And every few weeks the liquid was filtered through a scrap of cloth and funnelled into a old whisky bottle.

  Rutere had already been drinking. Swaying on his feet, he handed the bottle to Ntoto, who took a long swig. The raw liquid burnt its way down his gullet until it reached his stomach, where it nestled like a comforting hot compress.

  Outside, the rain hammered down, and the noise was soothing. Ntoto took a final slug, smacked his lips and let sleep embrace him. All things considered, it had been a good day . . .

  It was one of life’s ironies that the Mboya Boys’ bitter enemy, Mayor Willifred Guchu, had been instrumental, albeit indirectly, in providing them with their refuge.

  The first, and so far the only, scheme to provide water to Kireba had been launched soon after Guchu had been elected mayor some ten years ago. It had had a promising start. Giant excavators gouged a trench six feet deep and six feet wide out of the rich red soil, and the huge concrete pipes were laid in their wake. Unfortunately for the residents of Kireba, the trench never reached the water reservoir, which was its destination, some five miles away.

  The contractors claimed that they had not been paid the second instalment. Auditors called in by the contract managers, the United Nations Development Programme, reported “serious discrepancies and several major anomalies” in the accounts. Both the UNDP accountant and Mayor Guchu came under suspicion, but there was no hard evidence. Something had to be done, nevertheless. The accountant was posted to Nigeria, a move that left his colleagues divided. Some regarded it as harsh punishment for what they felt was a minor transgression; others saw it as a fitting reward for initiative, and were envious of the rich pickings that awaited him in west Africa. The mayor himself emerged more powerful than ever, keeping the Landcruiser which he insisted had been purchased out of his own funds.

  Whatever the reason for the non-payment, Phase One of the UNDP City Water Project was suspended. The trench ended abruptly, just short of the point at which it was intended to divert the foul-smelling Kireba River. Older residents could remember fishing the river and swimming in it. Over the years, however, it had become little more than an open sewer.

  For Titus Ntoto and his fellow gang members, the pipes were a haven in which they were safe from the truncheon-wielding policemen and the well-intentioned expatriate ladies who served on the Adopt-a-Street Boy committee. It took a brave man or woman to face such squalor and to risk being pelted with filth by the urchins, whose throwing arms performed with an accuracy that would be the envy of a professional cricketer.

  Ever since Ntoto could remember, there had been a feud between the boys and Authority. On one memorable occasion the street children had been rounded up by the police, and held in the cells before being dumped well beyond the city limits. At least that had been the plan. When the time came to move the children from the police station into waiting trucks, the police recoiled in disgust and disarray: scores of youngsters had covered themselves in their own excrement, and made a break for freedom.

  Ntoto had been amongst those who had made good their escape, but there had been a high price to pay. Casual beatings of street children became the order of the day. Ntoto vowed he would take revenge on Mayor Guchu and his bully-boy police – but they were hollow vows and empty threats, made from the safety of the pipes that had become the boys’ home, and fuelled by draughts of home-brewed liquor.

  Usually these pipes, close to Kireba’s main waste dump, were safe from the regular African storms. But the storms that had been breaking over Kuwisha night after night this season were spectacular, and the one that broke that evening was in a class of its own. In the early hours of the morning, the overflow from the dam that formed part of Kireba’s boundary broke through the old earthworks, originally thrown up in preparation for the laying of the pipes. Joined by the existing floodwater, the torrent roared down the pipes, driving all before it, like a giant emetic of Nature.

  Before Ntoto and Rutere could rouse themselves from an alcohol-induced stupor, the wall of water was upon them. They were bowled along by a filthy, frothy wave that finally spat Ntoto out on what used to be the banks of the Kireba River, and deposited Rutere even further downstream. The next morning, drenched in the accumulated detritus, Titus Ntoto lay semiconscious. But not even his terrible hangover could block out the voices that were soon to rouse him.

  11

  “Fortunate is the bird that nests while it sings”

  Furniver was lost to the world, on a Florida houseboat where ace detective Travis McGee was navigating his way through a maze of drugs, corruption, adultery and murder. The office phone gave three rings, and then stopped, which usually indicated that a fax had come in. He swirled the bathwater, made a mental note to check the machine when he had dressed, and prepared for what he feared would be an ordeal.

  He eased himself out of the bath, and began towelling himself dry. Still naked, he moved to his bedroom, cautiously fingering the bump, but taking great care not to scratch it. What had been a disturbing possibility was in his mind at least becoming a nasty probability. Furniver recalled the advice he had received from old Africa hands when he first arrived in Kuwisha which he had found puzzling at the time.

  Most of it was straightforward: how to tell if your house steward was watering the whisky and stealing the sugar, how many days off to allow for funerals, the importance of references, or the merits of a daily gin and tonic as a malaria prophylactic. But one pearl of settler wisdom, the significance of which he had not fully grasped, stood out. Time and again Furniver was urged, in tones that were deadly serious:

  “Make sure your boy irons your underpants.”

  At first he dismissed it as an example of settler eccentricity, or an elaborate joke, the point of which he had not yet grasped. Until, that is, he decided one day to seek enlightenment fr
om the Oldest Member at the Thumaiga Club, the institution that was as old as Kuwisha itself.

  It had been early in Furniver’s stay, before the savings bank had been established, and he was staying at the Club. The OM, widely believed to have played an important and unpleasant part in putting down Kuwisha’s pre-independence troubles with the locals, or the “indigenous” as expatriates now called them, was deep in his usual chair, in front of a log fire and talking, as much to himself as anyone who would listen.

  “Back to the future,” the OM was grumbling, “back to the bloody future.”

  “What on earth do you mean?” asked Furniver.

  The OM was slightly inebriated, but this alone didn’t account for the passion in his voice. With a faraway look in his eyes, and a gin and tonic in his hand, he began to recite: “Morning at the Murchison, picnic at Pakwach, sandwiches in Sudan.”

  Furniver took his courage in both hands. You disagreed with the OM at your peril.

  “Sudan? With a war on? No one ever picnics at Pakwach these days, and I thought that the Murchison Falls was knocked off the tourist map by Idi Amin and has never really recovered.”

  “Point is,” said the OM, unfazed, “the journey could be done in the so-called bad old days, before we threw in the towel, and gave these bods independence. Travelling round this part of the world was easy then. And when it gets as good as it was, it will be a darn sight better than it is now. As I say, back to the future.”

  He tapped a battered copy of the 1960 edition of the Year Book and Guide to East Africa, never far from his hand. Kuwisha had become independent a few years later, but as far as the Oldest Member was concerned, 1960 was the year the rot set in.

  Pearson had once asked the OM why he had chosen that date:

  “Bloody Lancaster House! Constitutional conference. Gave the buggers self-government. Slippery slope, thin end of the wedge.”

  For reasons that Furniver could not fathom, the OM took a benevolent interest in him, possibly because he insisted that the banker must be related to “Boetie” Furniver, the district commissioner who had ruled his pre-independence patch of Kuwisha with a rod of iron.

  The OM turned to an advertisement on page eight, and read the text aloud.

  “East African Airways – Linking East Africa with the World . . . Fourteen different airlines provide services to and from Nairobi . . . linked with Bombay, Karachi and Aden by the twice weekly tourist Canadair services of East African Airways. Scheduled services to every part of the Central African Federation, as well as to Mozambique, Beira and Lourenco Marques in Portuguese East Africa, and to Johannesburg and Durban in the Union of South Africa . . . short-haul routes stretching from Entebbe through Jinja, Kisumu, Nairobi, Mombasa, Tanga and Zanzibar.”

  “Good Lord,” said Furniver. He beckoned the waiter for a second round of gin and tonic.

  “There’s more to come,” said the OM, and turned a few pages.

  “Here’s one of the best bits: ‘Package tours to Serengeti, two day excursions from Entebbe to Murchison Falls . . . holiday on the Nile . . . at Butiaba the SS Robert Corydon, a modern inland marine vessel, is boarded for the journey across Lake Albert to Pakwach, where a river steamer takes the visitor down the Nile to Nimule, through scenery of unqualified grandeur, where game is plentiful.’ ”

  The OM had made his point. Forty years ago one could fly to more places from Kuwisha than you can today. What is more, you could drive on safe roads, and be sure of ending the day at a decent hotel with clean sheets.

  Furniver broke into the OM’s reverie. There was something he had to know.

  “About the, er, steward and the, um, underpants, and the ironing business . . . ?”

  He kept his voice down, just above a whisper, in the hope that the OM would follow his example, and do the same.

  “Why should you make sure your boy irons your underpants, with a very hot iron?” roared the OM, as he sat upright in his armchair, galvanised by the subject.

  “Because it kills the eggs of the bloody jipu! Isn’t that right, Wheatcliff?”

  The head waiter who was passing nodded his head, and threw another log on the fire. Wheatcliffe and the OM had grown up together on the same farm. At twelve, the OM had been packed off to boarding school, and the relationship between the two boys had changed fundamentally. But something of the old friendship must have remained. Indeed, it was said in the club that Wheatcliff owed his job to the OM, which some members saw as evidence of a liberal heart – though none dared say as much in his hearing.

  Seeing that Furniver was still baffled, the Oldest Member took pity on him and explained, in words of one syllable, one of the grim realities of life in the East African tropics.

  By the time he was finished, Furniver was horrified. And now, long after that exchange, Furniver had to face the possibility that his steward had broken this iron rule of hygiene in the tropics. Was this wretched discomfort he was enduring, and the acute embarrassment that he faced, the price he was paying for disregarding settler wisdom – wisdom that was scoffed at by “liberals”, but which had been tried and tested over the years? Was he being punished for indulging his steward, Didymus Kigali? Had he, God forfend, failed to handle his “boy” in the correct fashion?

  Furniver went through the checklist of advice, ironing underpants apart, he had received from the remaining veterans of pre-independence Kuwisha. Had he, in the vernacular of the old white settlers, allowed his steward to become a “loafer”, a man who was lax and lazy? Had he “spoilt” him by allowing weekends off and introducing eight-hour working days? Had he allowed Kigali, an elder in the Church of the Blessed Redeemer, so much leisure that the boy was in danger of becoming “cheeky”, a frame of mind that encouraged subversion and bred dissidents? Had he encouraged his boy to get ideas above his station, by allowing him to watch the flat’s television set? Was he paying him too much, breaking the code that bound expatriates and settlers together as one?

  Furniver would have to plead guilty on every count. He had done all this. What is more, he had done it without being prompted. The only request made by Mr Kigali had been for time off on Saturday afternoons, so he could deliver sermons at his church.

  There was one question, one question above all, that Furniver had to answer: Would this decent, God-fearing old man commit a heinous, unforgivable offence, and neglect to iron his employer’s underpants?

  Certainly not, decided Furniver. But the itch seemed to get more insistent by the hour. He thought hard. Suddenly, with a sense of shame, and a shudder of distaste for the consequences, Furniver recalled a morning after the night before. It had been an enthusiastic send-off for the first secretary at the French embassy. Furniver had woken the next day, worse for wear, and running late for an appointment.

  Didymus Kigali had, as was his custom, left the newly washed laundry, fresh dried under the sun, in the kitchen, ready for the hot iron. Furniver remembered searching impatiently in his drawers for clean and ironed pants, thus overlooking the pile of neatly ironed underwear on the shelf in the built-in cupboard. So he had rummaged in the kitchen, and pulled on a pair of underpants, which had been washed, but not ironed.

  Furniver groaned at the recollection, and cursed himself. What a fool he had been! What a price he was paying!

  12

  “When the elephant spits out its phlegm, don’t try to measure its tusks”

  The rains that soaked Kuwisha did not disturb the slumbers of Ferdinand Mlambo. The senior kitchen toto at State House happily snored away, deep in a sleep induced and enhanced by bedtime puffs of Mtoko Gold, Kuwisha’s best bhang. He was dreaming of his ambitions, distracted from the cares of the world, safe and warm, under the table in the State House kitchen, a rotund dormouse deep in a nest of blankets and old newspapers.

  Mlambo was a young man with prospects. Technically he was a citizen of Kuwisha. But although he had been born in the capital fourteen years ago he felt that he was Zimbabwean, and his friends regarded him as Zimbabwea
n. His grandparents were from that country, as were his mother and father. To be a Zimbabwean in Kuwisha could be a problem under most circumstances. Jobs were scarce, and there was growing resentment of foreigners who had jobs that could be done by locals. But for Mlambo, the fact that he was treated as a foreigner was a positive advantage.

  The boy, who followed the complexities of Kuwisha politics with a shrewdness developed out of a well-honed instinct for survival, knew full well that the presidential elections, due to be held in the next few weeks, could see an upheaval in the country’s affairs. President Nduka could quite possibly lose. Were he to go, there would be a massive change in the State House staff, a change that was certain to favour the kinsfolk of the new president. But with any luck, Mlambo would survive, provided he kept his head down. So it was a positive advantage to have no identification with, and no apparent sympathy for, any one of Kuwisha’s many indigenous ethnic groups.

  To the outsider’s eye, to be kitchen toto at State House, the official residence and centre of government, might not seem a job of great import. Even if it was pointed out that Ferdinand Mlambo was not simply a kitchen toto, he was the senior kitchen toto, who could – and often did – make life hell for his two subordinates, the job still seemed insignificant.

  Yet only an outsider could come to this conclusion. As senior kitchen toto, Mlambo was answerable to Lovemore Mboga, the formidable State House steward, widely believed to be a member of Kuwisha’s Central Intelligence Organisation. The boy’s duties ranged from shining the silver for State House banquets, to acting as the president’s food taster. And more than that, perhaps most important of all, he had become the unofficial supplier of bhang to the State House staff.

  Thanks to his position at State House, Mlambo ate well. Indeed, his duties ensured that he ate like a prince, a major factor in his rapid growth. Although he had only just turned fourteen, he could pass for a lad several years older. Compared to the ill-nourished street urchins, he looked like a young giant, and had the swaggering confidence of a man of destiny.