Last Orders at Harrods

by Michael Holman

  And just in case Pearson was inclined to ignore the request, he warned:

  “You won’t get past the security checks on the way to the airport without it.”

  As it turned out, the process was reasonably quick and painless.

  He presented himself at the information ministry, housed in a prefab – a building constructed from a kit of frame and panels, designed to be erected quickly, with a comparatively short life.

  Pearson reckoned the office he was in had been put up in the 1950s, the period when settler rule had not quite realised that its days were numbered, and African nationalism was only just becoming aware of its strength. It had that colonial works’ department look about and feel to it, with its cement veranda and vestiges of shrubbery. Inside the style was very different. Offices built of wood panels with a glossy dark veneer had been added, seemingly at random, carving out space by dividing and subdividing the original rooms. The passages were now dark and narrow, and partly blocked by the rubbish of decades – chairs with missing legs, rickety tables, dusty files, broken fans, old blinds – which no-one had the authority or the initiative to repair, sell, or simply throw out.

  The receptionist’s desk was deserted. But a soft brushing noise came from down the passage, and Pearson went in search of it.

  “Where is the permanent secretary?”

  “She not come,” said an old woman with a home-made broom of grass and twigs, pausing in her work. She went back to her task, and Pearson was tempted to call the whole thing off. Instead he settled down to wait, and as he waited he watched.

  Brush, brush, brush, steadily brushing carpets so ingrained with dust that the pattern was barely discernible, and the pile was almost worn smooth. Brush, brush, brush. Pearson wondered whether the old woman brushed when no-one was present, or was she going through the motions for his benefit. Then he remembered that when he first entered the office, he had heard the rasp of her brush from behind one of the office doors.

  Brush, brush, brush. The woman looked in her seventies. Pearson reckoned she was probably in her early fifties. She worked her way steadily down the passage. At first he thought her work was pointless. Whatever was brushed was not collected. There was no dustpan in sight. She also carried a bundle of rags. Every now and then she paused, and took the bundle, and passed it over the surface of a desk, the arms of a chair, the top of the filing cabinet.

  Pearson’s interest flagged, and he looked around the office in which he was sitting. A gap in the ceiling, where a panel had dropped out, revealed the timber frame. The curtains of both the external window and an internal window into the passage were drawn, and yellowing netting was pulled across the curtains. An air-conditioner laboured and wheezed, but he could still hear the brush, brush, brush as the old woman went about her business.

  Pearson counted the calendars. There were three on the wall, and two on the filing cabinet. He read the exhortations above the dates. “The Lord will Perfect that Which Concerneth Me,” and the single word “Perfect” was outlined in a rectangular box. “The Lord will satisfy me with long life and prosperity.”

  “God is my provider.”

  A yellowing fridge, rubber seal dangling, was marked with the letters and figures: EPD/DIST/04/01, and a picture of President Josiah Nduka hung on the wall, above the desk. Dust was still being moved around the carpet, but Pearson looked again, and now he saw the purpose. He looked first at where the cleaner had been, and then at the stretch of carpet she had yet to reach. It dawned on him. You can tell it has been swept, he realised. It was like raking a bunker, eliminating the crater made in the sand by the golf ball, or removing the traces of the stroke that propels the ball onto the green, and the tread of the golfer. The sand remains, but the contours have been restored.

  The permanent secretary arrived and to Pearson’s surprise, the official greeted him cordially, but offered no explanation for the delay. Somewhat unusually, there was a photographer on hand to take the mug shots. Within a few minutes he had his accreditation.

  Pearson decided to walk from the information ministry to the Outspan, where he had left his car, a journey of less than five minutes. The city centre was quiet. Office workers had left early to start their Uhuru holiday weekend, leaving behind a few askaris, handfuls of curious tourists, and prowling packs of feral street children. He set off confidently. Small deft hands brushed against his pockets, as soft and subtle in their grubby touch as the wings of a butterfly.

  “Give me ngwee, boss.”

  Pearson walked faster, resisting the temptation to run the last stretch.

  “Just five ngwee, boss.”

  He felt a tug at the case that held his computer, and he struck out:

  “Little bastards.”

  One of the boys laughed derisively.

  “You are shit,” said the urchin, and giggled.

  He was a child, no more than ten.

  There were now a dozen boys surrounding him, and he flailed out. Tiny fingers dipped into his pockets. Hateful grubby midgets, with stick legs and sunken chests and pot bellies, made him feel like a Gulliver surrounded by Lilliputians, and the image pushed him closer to panic. Fear and anger battled against compassion for Pearson’s soul. Less than halfway, with the Outspan almost in sight, he turned back. By that stage, there must have been twenty jeering boys, all with glue tubes, all with glazed eyes and snot-encrusted noses, following a few yards behind him. He heard them mocking as he got into an ancient black taxi.

  “Bastards,” he muttered again, and immediately felt ashamed.

  “Outspan.”

  The driver nodded, and commiserated.

  “Thieves. Dangerous.”

  The journey took barely two minutes, but Pearson paid double the fare. It did not make him feel any better, and he realised that he was trembling. It called for a gin and tonic. He took the drink to the sanctuary of the hotel’s residents’ lounge. Pearson had stayed only a few nights, at the start of his posting to Kuwisha, but the experience had left an indelible impression on him. As he sat among the ghosts of the country’s colonial past he felt soothed and at ease, his shaking stopped . . . and he let his mind drift into comfortable nostalgia, secure in a hotel that was at the peak of its decline.

  The click and clack of balls and cues still seemed to drift from the hotel’s musty billiard room, where a stencilled instruction mounted above the scoreboard requested the last person using the table to turn out the lights.

  The lounge where he was sitting had deep chintz-covered armchairs, and long forgotten novels sat on the shelves of the glass-fronted bookcase, where another notice said: “Key obtainable from reception”, but the key had long gone missing. You were expected to write your name and room number in the notebook, with a pencil attached by a piece of string. But things had got slack, and no-one bothered any more.

  It was a hotel where Pearson had woken to the clink of thick crockery rattling on the trays carrying early morning tea, with the sugar in bowls and not in sealed paper packets, and where a jug of hot water came with a pot of strong tea. He knew if he dozed off, there was no danger of missing breakfast (served between 7 a.m. and 8.30 a.m., except on Sundays, when it is from 7.30 a.m. to 9 a.m.), for he would wake again when the verandas got their daily red-wax polish.

  The dining room floor creaked, wooden beams crossed the ceiling, and the food was British colonial. The menu for each table was typed on the receptionist’s Remington, which also tapped out the bill at the end of your stay.

  He recalled the breakfast menu which had “Good Morning” without an exclamation mark, and there was no sign saying, “Please wait to be shown to your table.”

  The waiters were not servants but retainers, in bow tie and black jackets and starched white shirts, and expected you to be at your table between 7.30 p.m. and 8 p.m. because they liked to leave for their rooms in Kireba by 10 p.m.

  The ceilings in the rooms were high, and geckoes came out in the evening. Guests slept beneath a mosquito net, and watched the fl
ames from the fireplace flicker on the ceiling, and when they awoke the embers still glowed.

  At night, even in the city, the sky was clear and the stars lay low, and the sounds of the city drifted in, and cigar smoke hung in the air. No key-cards at the Outspan, just mortice locks and long-shanked keys, attached to blocks of wood, polished by handling over the years. It was a hotel at its decrepit but genteel best. No doubt someone would decide to improve it. When that happened, Pearson decided, it would not be worth staying there any more . . . not that he expected to return to Kuwisha, at least not in the foreseeable future.

  It was time to go. He drained his glass, bade farewell to the ghosts, and paid the bar bill. And as he drove to the airport, his spirits slumped, his dislike of President Nduka got stronger, became corrosive. It eroded his judgement and heightened his fears. He should never have discussed his scheme in his office. What a fool! It was almost certainly bugged. And his mobile phone, which a friend in an intelligence service had warned him could serve as a listening device, whether switched on or off . . . he should have locked it in his car. But Lucy’s jibes were still ringing in his ears.

  Suddenly a matatu swerved in front of him, horn blaring, and Pearson found himself sweating profusely.

  He pulled into the verge, mopped his face, and took a deep breath.

  “Pull yourself together, man, get a grip.”

  19

  “When young men dance, hide the cooking pots”

  Grubby flags hung listlessly from the streetlights that lined the route from the airport to the national stadium, venue for the celebration of Uhuru Day, the anniversary of Kuwisha’s independence. Once an occasion of national rejoicing, Uhuru Day had become just another public holiday, distinguished only by the national broadcast which President Nduka insisted on giving, and the presence of the African leader invited as the State guest.

  Every lamp post on the route was decorated with red, green and yellow bunting, and a crossed hoe and Kalashnikov rifle, the national colours and symbol of the country whose president was this year’s official visitor.

  Platoons of smartly clad schoolchildren, clutching miniature flags, lined the route. At the airport itself, the mbumba were warming up, the formidable vanguard of the ruling party, and whose patron was President Nduka himself. The guest of honour’s plane was running three hours late, and to pass the time the women were going through their repertoire. Every now and then the President joined in, entering the ranks of the dancing ladies, their buttocks and breasts shaking and wobbling in time to the rhythmic stamping that characterised these gatherings.

  Their loyalty to the president was not in doubt, and these praise singers and dancers appeared on all state occasions. Clad in cloth in the colours of Kuwisha, broad stripes of blue, green and black, and prominently featuring the stern but benevolent face of President Nduka, they performed across the length and breadth of the country.

  Pearson watched as the buxom ululating mbumba were joined yet again by Nduka, unexpectedly nimble for a man thought to be anywhere between his mid-seventies and mid-eighties. Their ranks opened, and the president disappeared, his progress indicated only by the spasmodic emergence of the tip of his presidential flywhisk. Security around the president was invariably tight, but this was one of the few occasions when his bodyguards relaxed, knowing he was safe in the bosom of the nation.

  Pearson sat fretful, nervous and apprehensive. Did he really want a face-to-face exchange with a man whose election prospects he was trying to sabotage? What if he had been rumbled, and the interview had become a trap? It might explain the insistence on photos for the accreditation . . .

  He had caught Punabantu’s eye on arrival, and searched his face for any clue, but the harassed press secretary only nodded amiably and motioned towards the VIP waiting room.

  Pearson had spent a good part of his years in Africa simply waiting. “Somebody, or something, will always turn up,” said an old hand. “Just wait, read a book, and never lose your temper.”

  Often the waiting took place in tacky rooms, furnished with a lack of taste that seemed deliberate. This one was no exception. On the tables was the usual assortment of magazines. Not for the first time, Pearson wondered how it was that, whether in Lusaka or Lagos, Luanda or Lilongwe, the magazines were the same: the glossy products of Taiwan and North Korea, together with the house journals of UN organisations.

  Pearson spotted the latest offering from the United Nations Centre for Human Development, which had its headquarters in Kuwisha. He leafed through its forty-page magazine, Habitat Debate. One article in particular caught his attention: “Shifting Paradigms”, by a writer who was unfamiliar to him: “An equable and holistic view of the city,” read Pearson, “is what should drive local governments, while all other partners will naturally be driven by their own, narrower, interests.”

  True, how very true, he thought.

  On the opposite page was an equally engrossing article on redefining international co-operation, which extolled the benefits of a “common humanity that will allow us to progress together.” It was illustrated by a cartoon that showed a beaming young woman casting off her jacket marked “capitalism”, and shaking the hand of a smiling worker who was discarding a shirt marked “communism” with equal enthusiasm.

  Cecil groaned so loudly that he awoke the occupant of an adjacent armchair. The man graciously accepted the journalist’s apologies and went back to sleep.

  The mbumba were still at it. Pearson felt terminally bored. An hour later, he had come to the end of the available reading material, but something in one of the articles had jogged his memory. He jotted down a proverb:

  “Beware the tick bird that eats the seed of the marula tree.”

  It was sufficiently obscure, he felt, to give even Shadrack pause for thought. Still no word on the presidential audience. He looked round the room.

  There must have been a dozen other supplicants for the favour of great men, patiently waiting, and taking the chance to catch up on sleep. Like the anteroom at State House, natural light was kept out. Air-conditioners whirred and wheezed, coughed or spluttered, but at least they worked. This was, after all, the VIP lounge. Two listless ladies ferried tepid colas and orange drinks to those who were awake, and needed something to wash down the salted groundnuts, set out in white saucers around the dim room.

  There was no sign of impatience, no trace of frustration. All present had reached the annex to the rich, the famous and the influential, who had gathered at the airport to welcome the official visitor. Those in the waiting room could do no more than wait. Most of them surrendered to the deep, capacious armchairs and sofas, topped by a crescent of hair oil, closed their eyes, and dozed.

  Pearson rebuked himself for his own fidgeting impatience, and decided to pass the time by playing his favourite ministerial waiting room game. The idea was to take four or five words or phrases from a United Nations document, and rearrange them so that the new sentence made as much sense as the original.

  He chose a page from a United Nations Habitat press release, and selected the words that irritated him most: capacity building, ownership, partnership, and integral, and set about putting them in a different order. He had made it too easy for himself, however, and the words slotted effortlessly into place:

  “Capacity building partnership is integral to ownership.”

  “Partnership and ownership are integral to capacity building.”

  “Integral to partnership is capacity building and ownership.”

  “Ownership of capacity building is integral to partnership.”

  Much to the nervous disapproval of the security staff who guarded the entrance to the lounge, Pearson decided to stretch his legs. He stepped through the door and strolled ten yards down the passage, where it was possible to look out at the roped-off reception area on the airport apron.

  Pearson was watching the mbumba, trying to spot the president, when a hand tapped his shoulder. It was Punabantu:

  “Your reques
t for an audience with His Excellency has been granted.”

  “Very kind,” said Pearson obsequiously. Punabantu ignored him.

  “Follow me.”

  Pearson dutifully followed.

  To Pearson’s surprise, he was still nervous. Although he had attended press conferences addressed by the president, this would be his first one-on-one, his first personal encounter with the man who had dominated the nation for so long.

  Punabantu had tried to put him at his ease, but instead of sitting in on the interview, as Pearson had expected, the press officer excused himself, and backed out of the room, closing the doors as he left. The president’s personal secretary sat at the other end of a long oak table, notebook open, pencil poised, and looked curiously at Pearson. The president entered, dressed in his usual pinstriped suit, fresh-picked rose in its lapel:

  “So, Mr Pearson,” he said jovially.

  Pearson, expecting this introduction to be followed up, remained silent, awaiting the next sentence. Nduka looked at him quizzically.

  “Is this an example of dumb insolence, or are you just dumb?”

  Pearson was certainly not dumb, and had no intention of being insolent. It was simply that despite himself, he was overawed, seated in front of one of African nationalism’s founding fathers.

  He had often thought about what he would do in this situation, how he would conduct an interview. Would he leave the tough questions until the end, and spend the first part of the session simply taking stock of the man, and gathering colour? Or should he go straight for the jugular, and raise the issue of corruption that was destroying the country?

  As he sat there he felt his resolve falling away, for he was coming under the spell of the old man. To his dismay, he felt uneasy, even fearful. This, after all, was living history in front of him. Nduka was the man who had galvanised his country into rejecting British rule, whose political challengers had all died in road accidents that were never fully explained, and who had presided over an increasingly authoritarian regime in which allegations of torture of political dissidents had become commonplace.