by Ian McDonald
‘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 II 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 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 interests 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 on to the streets of Manchester. We were on the last candle at the last table by the time Ten got round 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 grey and damp of an English summer.
Afterwards, 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 savouring 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 round 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 re
fugee. 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 afterwards. 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 lilt her hand to her mouth. I was in like a shot.
‘Shit shit shit shit,’ she swore. It was a deep cut, and blood ran freely down her forefinger. I rushed her to the tap, stuck it under the cold, then went for the medical bag. I returned with gauze, plasters and a heal-the-world attitude.
‘It’s okay,’ she said, holding the finger up. ‘It’s better.’
The cut had vanished. No blood, no scab. All that remained was a slightly raised red weal. As I watched, even that faded.
‘How?’
‘I don’t know,’ Ten said. ‘But it’s better.’
I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want there to be anything more difficult or complex in Ten’s life. I wanted what she had from her past to be enough, to be all. I knew this was something alien; no one healed like that. I thought that if I let it go, it would never trouble us again. I had not calculated on the bomb.
Some fucking Nazis or other had been blast-bombing gay bars. London, Edinburgh, Dublin so far, always a Friday afternoon, work over, weekend starting. Manchester was on the alert. So were the bombers. Tuesday, lunch time, half a kilo of semtex with nails and razor blades packed round it went off under a table outside a Canal Street bar. No one died, but a woman at the next table lost both legs from the knees down and there were over fifty casualties. Ten had been going in for the afternoon shift. She was twenty metres away when the bomb went off. I got the call from the hospital same time as the news broke on the radio.
‘Get the fuck over there,’ Willy the boss ordered. I didn’t need ordering. Manchester Royal Infirmary casualty was bedlam. I saw the doctors going around in a slow rush and the people looking up at everyone who came in, very very afraid and the police taking statements and the trolleys in the aisles and I thought, It must have been something like this in Nairobi, at the end. The receptionist showed me to a room where I was to wait for a doctor. I met her in the corridor, a small, harassed-looking Chinese girl.
‘Ah, Mr. Giddens. You’re with Ms Bi, that’s right?’
‘That’s right, how is she?’
‘Well, she was brought in with multiple lacerations, upper body, left side of face, left upper arm and shoulder…’
‘Oh Jesus God. And now?’
‘See for yourself.’
Ten walked down the corridor. If she had not been wearing a hospital robe, I would have sworn she was unchanged from how I had left her that morning.
‘Shone.’
The weals were already fading from her face and hands. A terrible prescience came over me, so strong and cold I almost threw up.
‘We want to keep her in for further tests, Mr. Giddings,’ the doctor said. ‘As you can imagine, we’ve never seen anything quite like this before.’
‘Shone, I’m fine, I want to go home.’
‘Just to be sure, Mr. Giddens.’
When I brought Ten back a bag of stuff, the receptionist directed me to Intensive Care. I ran the six flights of stairs to ICU, burning with dread. Ten was in a sealed room full of white equipment. When she saw me, she ran from her bed to the window, pressed her hands against it.
‘Shone!’ Her words came through a speaker grille. ‘They won’t let me out!’
Another doctor led to me a side room. There were two policemen there, and a man in a suit.
‘What the hell is this?’
‘Mr. Giddens. Ms Bi, she is a Kenyan refugee?’
‘You fucking know that.’
‘Easy, Mr. Giddens. We’ve been running some tests on Ms Bi, and we’ve discovered the presence in her bloodstream of fullerene nanoprocessors.’
‘Nanowhat?’
‘What are commonly know as Chaga spores.’
Ten, Dust Girl, firing and firing and firing at the glider, the gun blossoming in her hand, the shanty town melting behind her as her clothes fell apart, her arm sticking through the shield wall as she shouted, I’m chipped, I’m chipped! The soldiers shaving her head, hosing her down. Those things she had carried inside her. All those runs for the Americans.
‘Oh my God.’
There was a window in the little room. Through it I saw Ten sitting on a plastic chair by the bed, hands on her thighs, head bowed.
‘Mr. Giddens.’ The man in the suit flashed a little plastic wallet. ‘Robert McGlennon, Home Office Immigration. Your, ah…’ He nodded at the window.
‘Partner.’
‘Partner. Mr Giddens, I have to tell you, we cannot be certain that Ms. Bi’s continued presence is not a public health risk. Her refugee status is dependent on a number of conditions, one of which is that…’
‘You’re fucking deporting her…’
The two policemen stirred. I realised then that they were not there for Ten. There were there for me.
‘It’s a public health issue, Mr Giddens. She should never have been allowed in in the first place. We have no idea of the possible environmental impact. You, of all people, should be aware what these things can do. Have done. Are still doing. I have to think of public safety.’
‘Public safety, fuck!’
‘Mr Giddens…’
I went to the window. I beat my fists on the wired glass.
‘Ten! Ten! They’re trying to deport you! They want to send you back!’
The policemen prised me away from the window. On the far side, Ten yelled silently.
‘Look, I don’t like having to do this,’ the man in the suit said.
‘When?’
‘Mr. Giddens.’
‘When? Tell me, how long has she got?’
‘Usually there’d be a detention period, with limited rights of appeal. But as this is a public health issue…’
‘You’re going to do it right now.’
‘The order is effective immediately, Mr. Giddens. I’m sorry. These officers will go with you back to your home. If you could gather up the rest of her things…’
‘At least let me say goodbye. Jesus, you owe me that!’
‘I can’t allow that, Mr. Giddens. There’s a contamination risk.’
‘Contamination? I’ve only been fucking her for the past six months.’
As the cops marched me out, the doctor came up for a word.
‘Mr. Giddens, these nanoprocessors in her bloodstream…’
‘That are fucking getting her thrown out of the country.’
‘The fullerenes…’
‘She heals quick. I saw it.’
‘They do much more than that, Mr. Giddens. She’ll probably never get sick again. And there’s some evidence that they prevent telomere depletion in cell division.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means, she ages very much more slowly than we do. Her life expectancy may be, I don’t know, two, three hundred years.’
I stared. The policemen stared.
‘There’s more. We observed unfamiliar structures in her brain; the best I can describe them is, the nanoprocessors seem to be re-engineering dead neurons into a complementary neural network.’
‘A spare brain?’
‘An auxiliary brain.’
‘What would you do with that?’
‘What wouldn’t you do with that, Mr. Giddens.’ He wiped his hand across his mouth. ‘This bit is pure speculation, but…’
‘But.’
‘But in some way, she’s in control of it all. I think—this is just a theory—that through this auxiliary brain she’s able to interact with the nanoprocessors. She might be able to ma
ke them do what she wants. Program them.’
‘Thank you for telling me that,’ I said bitterly. ‘That makes it all so much easier.’
I took the policemen back to my house. I told them to make themselves tea. I took Ten’s neatly arranged books and CDs off my shelves and her neatly folded clothes out of my drawers and her toilet things out of my bathroom and put them back in the two bags in which she had brought them. I gave the bags to the policemen, they took them away in their car. I never got to say goodbye. I never learned what flight she was on, where she flew from, when she left this country. A face behind glass. That was my last memory. The thing I feared—insane, out of nowhere—had taken her away.
After Ten went, I was sick for a long time. There was no sunshine, no rain, no wind. No days or time, just a constant, high-pitched, quiet whine in my head. People at work played out a slightly amplified normality for my benefit. Alone, they would ask, very gently, How do you feel?
‘How do I feel?’ I told them. ‘Like I’ve been shot with a single, high velocity round, and I’m dead, and I don’t know it.’
I asked for someone else to take over the I-Nation account. Wynton called me but I could not speak with him. He sent round a bottle of that good Jamaican import liqueur, and a note, ‘Come and see us, any time.’ Willy arranged me a career break and a therapist.
His name was Greg, he was a client-centred therapist, which meant I could talk for as long as I liked about whatever I liked and he had to listen. I talked very little, those first few sessions. Partly I felt stupid, partly I didn’t want to talk, even to a stranger. But it worked, little by little, without my knowing. I think I only began to be aware of that the day I realised that Ten was gone, but not dead. Her last photo of Africa was still on the fridge and I looked at it and saw something new: down there, in there, somewhere, was Ten. The realisation was vast and subtle at the same time. I think of it like a man who finds himself in darkness. He imagines he’s in a room, no doors, no windows, and that he’ll never find the way out. But then he hears noises, feels a touch on his face, smells a subtle smell, and he realises that he is not in a room at all—he is outside: the touch on his face is the wind, the noises are night birds, the smell is from night-blooming flowers, and above him, somewhere, are stars.