by Neil Clarke
“Take me to Chiromo Road!” I shouted. The drivers would veer away, or hoot and swear. Some even aimed at me. I sidestepped them, I was too fast for them. “Chiromo Road, or I will kill you!” Tacticals laughed and yelled as they swept past in their picknis. Not one stopped. Everyone had seen too many guns.
There was a Kenyan Army convoy on Pumwani Road, so I cut up through the cardboard cities into Kariokor. As long as I kept the Nairobi River, a swamp of refuse and sewage, to my left, I would eventually come out onto Ngara Road. The shanty people fled from the striped demon with the big gun.
“Get out of my way!” I shouted. And then, all at once, the alley people disobeyed me. They stood stock still. They looked up.
I felt it before I saw it. Its shadow was cold on my skin. I stopped running. I too looked up and it swooped down on me. That is what I thought, how I felt—this thing had been sent from the heart of the Chaga to me alone. The glider was bigger than I had imagined, and much much darker. It swept over me. I was paralyzed with dread, then I remembered what I held in my hand. I lifted my gun and fired at the dark bat-thing. I fired and fired and fired until all I heard was a stiff click. I stood, shaking, as the glider vanished behind the plastic shanty roofs. I stood, staring at my hand holding the gun. Then the tiniest yellow buds appeared around the edge of the cylinder. The buds unfolded into crystals, and the crystals spread across the black, oiled metal like scale. More buds came out of the muzzle and grew back down the barrel. Crystals swelled up and choked the cocked hammer.
I dropped the gun like a snake. I tore at my hair, my clothes, I scrubbed at my skin. My clothes were already beginning to change. My zebra-striped coat was blistering. I pulled out the chip injector. It was a mess of yellow crystals and flowers. I could not hope to save them now. I threw it away from me. The photographs of Knutson with the children fell to the earth. They bubbled up and went to dust. I tore at my coat; it came apart in my fingers into tatters of plastic and spores. I ran. The heel of one knee-boot gave way. I fell, rolled, recovered, and stripped the foolish things off me. All around me, the people of Kariokor were running, ripping at their skin and their clothes with their fingers. I ran with them, crying with fear. I let them lead me. My finery came apart around me. I ran naked, I did not care. I had nothing now. Everything had been taken from me, everything but the chip in my arm. On every side the plastic and wood shanties sent up shoots and stalks of Chaga.
We crashed up against the UN emergency cordon at Kariokor Market. Wicker shields pushed us back; rungu clubs went up, came down. People fell, clutching smashed skulls. I threw myself at the army line.
“Let me through!”
I thrust my arm between the riot shields.
“I’m chipped! I’m chipped!”
Rungus rose before my face.
“UN pass! I’m chipped!”
The rungus came down, and something whirled them away. A white man’s voice shouted.
“Jesus fuck, she is! Get her out of there! Quick!”
The shield wall parted, hands seized me, pulled me through.
“Get something on her!”
A combat jacket fell on my shoulders. I was taken away very fast through the lines of soldiers to a white hummer with a red cross on the side. A white man with a red cross vest sat me on the back step and ran a scanner over my forearm. The wound was livid now, throbbing.
“Tendeléo Bi. US Embassy Intelligence Liaison. Okay, Tendeléo Bi, I’ve no idea what you were doing in there, but it’s decontam for you.”
A second soldier—an officer, I guessed—had come back to the hummer.
“No time. Civs have to be out by twenty three hundred.”
The medic puffed his cheeks.
“This is not procedure . . .”
“Procedure?” the officer said. “With a whole fucking city coming apart around us? But I guarantee you this, the Americans will go fucking ballistic if we fuck with one of their spooks. A surface scrub’ll do . . .”
They took me over to a big boxy truck with a biohazard symbol on the side. It was parked well away from the other vehicles. I was shivering from shock. I made no complaint as they shaved all hair from my body. Someone gently took away the army jacket and showed me where to stand. Three men unrolled high-pressure hoses from the side of the truck and worked me from top to bottom. The water was cold, and hard enough to be painful. My skin burned. I twisted and turned to try to keep it away from my nipples and the tender parts of my body. On the third scrub, I realized what they were doing, and remembered.
“Take me to decontam!” I shouted. “I want to go to decontam! My family’s there, don’t you realize?” The men would not listen to me. I do not think they even knew it was a young woman’s body they were hosing down. No one listened to me. I was dried with hot air guns, given some loose fatigues to wear, then put in the back of a diplomatic hummer that drove very fast through the streets to the airport. We did not go to the terminal building. There, I might have broken and run. We went through the wire gates, and straight to the open back of a big Russian transport plane. A line of people was going up the ramp into the cavern of its belly. Most of them were white, many had children, and all were laden with bags and goods. All were refugees, too . . . like me.
“My family is back there, I have to get them,” I told the man with the security scanner at the foot of the ramp.
“We’ll find them,” he said as he checked off my Judas chip against the official database. “That’s you. Good luck.” I went up the metal ramp into the plane. A Russian woman in uniform found me a seat in the middle block, far from any window. Once I was belted in I sat trembling until I heard the ramp close and the engines start up. Then I knew I could do nothing, and the shaking stopped. I felt the plane bounce over the concrete and turn onto the runway. I hoped a terrible hope: that something would go wrong and the plane would crash and I would die. Because I needed to die. I had destroyed the thing I meant to save and saved the thing that was worthless. Then the engines powered up and we made our run and though I could see only the backs of seats and the gray metal curve of the big cabin, I knew when we left the ground because I felt my bond with Kenya break and my home fall away beneath me as the plane took me into exile.
I pause now in my story now, for where it goes now is best told by another voice.
My name is Sean. It’s an Irish name. I’m not Irish. No bit of Irish in me, as you can probably see. My mum liked the name. Irish stuff was fashionable, thirty years ago. My telling probably won’t do justice to Tendeléo’s story; I apologize. My gift’s numbers. Allegedly. I’m a reluctant accountant. I do what I do well, I just don’t have a gut feel for it. That’s why my company gave me all the odd jobs. One of them was this African-Caribbean-World restaurant just off Canal Street. It was called I-Nation—the menu changed every week, the ambience was great, and the music was mighty. The first time I wore a suit there, Wynton the owner took the piss so much I never dressed up for them again. I’d sit at a table and poke at his VAT returns and find myself nodding to the drum and bass. Wynton would try out new grooves on me and I’d give them thumbs up or thumbs down. Then he’d fix me coffee with this liqueur he imported from Jamaica and that was the afternoon gone. It seemed a shame to invoice him.
One day Wynton said to me, “You should come to our evening sessions. Good music. Not this fucking bang bang bang. Not fucking deejays. Real music. Live music.”
However, my mates liked fucking deejays and bang bang bang so I went to I-Nation on my own. There was a queue but the door staff nodded me right in. I got a seat at the bar and a Special Coffee, compliments of the house. The set had already begun, the floor was heaving. That band knew how to get a place moving. After the dance set ended, the lead guitarist gestured offstage. A girl got up behind the mic. I recognized her—she waitressed in the afternoons. She was a small, quiet girl, kind of unnoticeable, apart from her hair which stuck out in spi
kes like it was growing back after a Number Nought cut with the razor.
She got up behind that mic and smiled apologetically. Then she began to sing, and I wondered how I had never thought her unnoticeable. It was a slow, quiet song. I couldn’t understand the language. I didn’t need to, her voice said it all: loss and hurt and lost love. Bass and rhythm felt out the depth and damage in every syllable. She was five foot nothing and looked like she would break in half if you blew on her, but her voice had a stone edge that said, I’ve been where I’m singing about. Time stopped; she held a note then gently let it go. I-Nation was silent for a moment. Then it exploded. The girl bobbed shyly and went down through the cheering and whistling. Two minutes later she was back at work, clearing glasses. I could not take my eyes off her. You can fall in love in five minutes. It’s not hard at all.
When she came to take my glass, all I could say was, “That was . . . great.”
“Thank you.”
And that was it. How I met Ten, said three shit words to her, and fell in love.
I never could pronounce her name. On the afternoons when the bar was quiet and we talked over my table she would shake her head at my mangling the vowel sounds.
“Eh-yo.”
“Ay-oh?”
The soft spikes of hair would shake again. Then, she never could pronounce my name either. Shan, she would say.
“No, Shawn.”
“Shone . . .”
So I called her Ten, which for me meant Il Primo, Top of the Heap, King of the Hill, A-Number-One. And she called me Shone. Like the sun. One afternoon when she was off shift, I asked Boss Wynton what kind of name Tendeléo was.
“I mean, I know it’s African, I can tell by the accent, but it’s a big continent.”
“It is that. She not told you?”
“Not yet.”
“She will when she’s ready. And Mr. Accountant, you fucking respect her.”
Two weeks later she came to my table and laid a series of forms before me like tarot cards. They were Social Security applications, Income Support, Housing Benefit.
“They say you’re good with numbers.”
“This isn’t really my thing, but I’ll take a look.” I flipped through the forms. “You’re working too many hours . . . they’re trying to cut your benefits. It’s the classic welfare trap. It doesn’t pay you to work.”
“I need to work,” Ten said.
Last in line was a Home Office Asylum Seeker’s form. She watched me pick it up and open it. She must have seen my eyes widen.
“Gichichi, in Kenya.”
“Yes.”
I read more.
“God. You got out of Nairobi.”
“I got out of Nairobi, yes.”
I hesitated before asking, “Was it bad?”
“Yes,” she said. “I was very bad.”
“I?” I said.
“What?”
“You said ‘I.’ I was very bad.”
“I meant it, it was very bad.”
The silence could have been uncomfortable, fatal even. The thing I had wanted to say for weeks rushed into the vacuum.
“Can I take you somewhere? Now? Today? When you finish? Would you like to eat?”
“I’d like that very much,” she said.
Wynton sent her off early. I took her to a great restaurant in Chinatown where the waiters ask you before you go in how much you’d like to spend.
“I don’t know what this is,” she said as the first of the courses arrived.
“Eat it. You’ll like it.”
She toyed with her wontons and chopsticks.
“Is something wrong with it?”
“I will tell you about Nairobi now,” she said. The food was expensive and lavish and exquisitely presented and we hardly touched it. Course after course went back to the kitchen barely picked over as Ten told me the story of her life, the church in Gichichi, the camps in Nairobi, the career as a posse girl, and of the Chaga that destroyed her family, her career, her hopes, her home, and almost her life. I had seen the coming of the Chaga on the television. Like most people, I had tuned it down to background muzak in my life; oh, wow, there’s an alien life-form taking over the southern hemisphere. Well, it’s bad for the safari holidays and carnival in Rio is fucked and you won’t be getting the Brazilians in the next World Cup, but the Cooperage account’s due next week and we’re pitching for the Maine Road job and interest rates have gone up again. Aliens schmaliens. Another humanitarian crisis. I had followed the fall of Nairobi, the first of the really big cities to go, trying to make myself believe that this was not Hollywood, this was not Bruce Willis versus the CGI. This was twelve million people being swallowed by the dark. Unlike most of my friends and work mates. I had felt something move painfully inside me when I saw the walls of the Chaga close on the towers of downtown Nairobi. It was like a kick in my heart. For a moment I had gone behind the pictures that are all we are allowed to know of our world, to the true lives. And now the dark had spat one of these true lives up onto the streets of Manchester. We were on the last candle at the last table by the time Ten got around to telling me how she had been dumped out with the other Kenyans at Charles de Gaulle and shuffled for months through EU refugee quotas until she arrived, jet-lagged, culture-shocked, and poor as shit, in the gray and damp of an English summer.
Afterward, I was quiet for some time. Nothing I could have said was adequate to what I had heard. Then I said, “Would you like to come home with me for a drink, or a coffee, or something?”
“Yes,” she said. Her voice was husky from much talking, and low, and unbearably attractive. “I would, very much.”
I left the staff a big tip for above-and-beyondness.
Ten loved my house. The space astonished her. I left her curled up on my sofa savoring the space as I went to open wine.
“This is nice,” she said. “Warm. Big. Nice. Yours.”
“Yes,” I said and leaned forward and kissed her. Then, before I could think about what I had done, I took her arm and kissed the round red blemish of her chip. Ten slept with me that night, but we did not make love. She lay, curled and chaste, in the hollow of my belly until morning. She cried out in her sleep often. Her skin smelled of Africa.
The bastards cut her housing benefit. Ten was distraught. Home was everything to her. Her life had been one long search for a place of her own; safe, secure, stable.
“You have two options,” I said. “One, give up working here.”
“Never,” she said. “I work. I like to work.” I saw Wynton smile, polishing the glasses behind the bar.
“Option two, then.”
“What’s that?”
“Move in with me.”
It took her a week to decide. I understood her hesitation. It was a place, safe, secure, stable, but not her own. On the Saturday I got a phone call from her. Could I help her move? I went around to her flat in Salford. The rooms were tatty and cold, the furniture charity-shop fare, and the decor ugly. The place stank of dope. The television blared, unwatched; three different boomboxes competed with each other. While Ten fetched her stuff, her flatmates stared at me as if I were something come out of the Chaga. She had two bags—one of clothes, one of music and books. They went in the back of the car and she came home with me.
Life with Ten. She put her books on a shelf and her clothes in a drawer. She improvised harmonies to my music. She would light candles on any excuse. She spent hours in the bathroom and used toilet paper by the roll. She was meticulously tidy. She took great care of her little money. She would not borrow from me. She kept working at I-Nation, she sang every Friday. She still killed me every time she got up on that stage.
She said little, but it told. She was dark and intensely beautiful to me. She didn’t smile much. When she did it was a knife through the heart of me. It was a sharp joy. Sex was
a sharpness of a different kind—it always seemed difficult for her. She didn’t lose herself in sex. I think she took a great pleasure from it, but it was controlled . . . it was owned, it was hers. She never let herself make any sound. She was a little afraid of the animal inside. She seemed much older than she was; on the times we went dancing, that same energy that lit her up in singing and sex burned out of her. It was then that she surprised me by being a bright, energetic, sociable eighteen-year-old. She loved me. I loved her so hard it felt like sickness. I would watch her, unaware I was doing it . . . watch the way she moved her hands when she talked on the phone, how she curled her legs under her when she watched television, how she brushed her teeth in the morning. I would wake up in the night just to watch her sleep. I would check she was still breathing. I dreaded something insane, something out of nowhere, taking her away.
She stuck a satellite photograph of Africa on the fridge. She showed me how to trace the circles of the Chaga through the clouds. Every week she updated it. Week by week, the circles merging. That was how I measured our life together, by the circles, merging. Week by week, her home was taken away. Her parents and sister were down there, under those blue and white bars of cloud; week by week the circles were running them out of choices.
She never let herself forget she had failed them. She never let herself forget she was a refugee. That was what made her older, in ways, than me. That was what all her tidiness and orderliness around the house were about. She was only here for a little time. It could all be lifted at a moment’s notice.
She liked to cook for me on Sundays, though the kitchen smelled of it for a week afterward. I never told her her cooking gave me the shits. She was chopping something she had got from the Caribbean stores and singing to herself. I was watching from the hall, as I loved to watch her without being watched. I saw her bring the knife down, heard a Kalenjin curse, saw her lift her hand to her mouth. I was in like a shot.