by Ian McDonald
Greg said nothing when I told him this—they never do, these client-centred boys, but after that session I went to the net and started the hunt for Tendeléo Bi. The Freedom of Information Act got me into the Immigration Service’s databases. Ten had been flown out on a secure military transport to Mombasa. UNHCR in Mombasa had assigned her to Likoni Twelve, a new camp to the south of the city. She was transferred out on November Twelfth. It took two days searching to pick up a Tendeléo Bi logged into a place called Samburu North three months later. Medical records said she was suffering from exhaustion and dehydration, but responding to sugar and salt treatment. She was alive.
On the first Monday of winter, I went back to work. I had lost a whole season. On the first Friday, Willy gave me print-out from an on-line recruitment agency.
‘I think you need a change of scene,’ he said. ‘These people are looking for a stock accountant.’
These people were Medecins Sans Frontiers. Where they needed a stock accountant was their East African theatre.
Eight months after the night the two policemen took away Ten’s things, I stepped off the plane in Mombasa. I think hell must be like Mombasa in its final days as capital of the Republic of Kenya, infrastructure unravelling, economy disintegrating, the harbour a solid mass of boat people and a million more in the camps in Likoni and Shimba Hills, Islam and Christianity fighting a new Crusade for control of this chaos and the Chaga advancing from the west and now the south, after the new impact at Tanga. And in the middle of it all, Sean Giddens, accounting for stock. It was good, hard, solid work in MSF Sector Headquarters, buying drugs where, when, and how we could; haggling down truck drivers and Sibirsk jet-jockeys; negotiating service contracts as spare parts for the Landcruisers gradually ran out, every day juggling budgets always too small against needs too big. I loved it more than any work I’ve ever done. I was so busy I sometimes forgot why I was there. Then I would go in the safe bus back to the compound and see the smoke going up from the other side of the harbour, hear the gunfire echo off the old Arab houses, and the memory of her behind that green wired glass would gut me.
My boss was a big bastard Frenchman, Jean-Paul Gastineau. He had survived wars and disasters on every continent except Antarctica. He liked Cuban cigars and wine from the valley where he was born and opera, and made sure he had them, never mind distance or expense. He took absolutely no shit. I liked him immensely. I was a fucking thin-blooded number-pushing black rosbif, but he enjoyed my creative accounting. He was wasted in Mombasa. He was a true front-line medic. He was itching for action.
One lunchtime, as he was opening his red wine, I asked him how easy it would to find someone in the camps. He looked at me shrewdly, then asked, ‘Who is she?’
He poured two glasses, his invitation to me. I told him my history and her history over the bottle. It was very good.
‘So, how do I find her?’
‘You’ll never get anything through channels,’ Jean-Paul said. ‘Easiest thing to do is go there yourself. You have leave due.’
‘No I don’t.’
‘Yes you do. About three weeks of it. Ah. Yes.’ He poked about in his desk drawers. He threw me a black plastic object like a large cell-phone.
‘What is it?’
‘US ID chips have a GPS transponder. They like to know where their people are. Take it. If she is chipped, this will find her.’
‘Thanks.’
He shrugged.
‘I come from a nation of romantics. Also, you’re the only one in this fucking place appreciates a good Beaune.’
I flew up north on a Sibirsk charter. Through the window I could see the edge of the Chaga. It was too huge to be a feature of the landscape, or even a geographical entity. It was like a dark sea. It looked like what it was…another world, that had pushed up against on our own. Like it, some ideas are too huge to fit into our everyday worlds. They push up through it, they take it over, and they change it beyond recognition. If what the doctor at Manchester Royal Infirmary had said about the things in Ten’s blood were true, then this was not just a new world. This was a new humanity. This was every rule about how we make our livings, how we deal with each other, how we lead our lives, all overturned.
The camps, also, are too big to take in. There is too much there for the world we’ve made for ourselves. They change everything you believe. Mombasa was no preparation. It was like the end of the world up there on the front line.
‘So, you’re looking for someone,’ Heino Rautavaara said. He had worked with Jean-Paul through the fall of Nairobi; I could trust him, Jay-Pee said, but I think he thought I was a fool, or, at best, a romantic. ‘No shortage of people here.’
Jean-Paul had warned the records wouldn’t be accurate. But you hope. I went to Samburu North, where my search in England had last recorded Ten. No trace of her. The UNHCR warden, a grim little American woman, took me up and down the rows of tents. I looked at the faces and my tracker sat silent on my hip. I saw those faces that night in the ceiling, and for many nights after.
‘You expect to hit the prize first time?’ Heino said as we bounced along the dirt track in an MSF Landcruiser to Don Dul.
I had better luck in Don Dul, if you can call it that. Ten had definitely been here two months ago. But she had left eight days later. I saw the log in, the log out, but there was no record of where she had gone.
‘No shortage of camps either,’ Heino said. He was a dour bastard. He couldn’t take me any further but he squared me an authorisation to travel on Red Cross/Crescent convoys, who did a five hundred mile run through the camps along the northern terminum. In two weeks I saw more misery than I ever thought humanity could take. I saw the laces and the hands and the bundles of scavenged things and I thought, why hold them here? What are they saving them from? Is it so bad in the Chaga? What is so terrible about people living long lives, being immune from sickness, growing extra layers in their brains? What is so frightening about people being able to go into that alien place, and take control of it, and make it into what they want?
I couldn’t see the Chaga, it lay just below the southern horizon, but I was constantly aware of its presence, like they say people who have plates in their skulls always feel a slight pressure. Sometimes, when the faces let me sleep, I would be woken instead by a strange smell, not strong, but distinct; musky and fruity and sweaty, sexy, warm. It was the smell of the Chaga, down there, blowing up from the south.
Tent to truck to camp to tent. My three weeks were running out and I had to arrange a lift back along the front line to Samburu and the flight to Mombasa. With three days left, I arrived in Eldoret, UNECTA’s Lake Victoria regional centre. It gave an impression of bustle, the shops and hotels and cafés were busy, but the white faces and American accents and dress sense said Eldoret was a company town. The Rift Valley Hotel looked like heaven after eighteen days on the front line. I spent an hour in the pool trying to beam myself into the sky. A sudden rain-storm drove everyone from the water but me. I floated there, luxuriating in the raindrops splashing around me. At sunset I went down to the camps. They lay to the south of the town, like a line of cannon-fodder against the Chaga. I checked the records, a matter of form. No Tendeléo Bi. I went in anyway. And it was another camp, and after a time, anyone can become insulated to suffering. You have to. You have to book into the big hotel and swim in the pool and eat a good dinner when you get back; in the camps you have to look at the faces just as faces and refuse to make any connection with the stories behind them. The hardest people I know work in the compassion business. So I went up and down the faces and somewhere halfway down some row I remembered this toy Jean-Paul had given me. I took it out. The display was flashing green. There was a single word: lock.
I almost dropped it.
I thought my heart had stopped. I felt hit between the eyes. I forgot to breathe. The world reeled sideways. My fucking stupid fingers couldn’t gel a precise reading. I ran down the row of tents, watching the figures. The digits told me how many
metres I was to north and east. Wrong way. I doubled back, ducked right at the next opening and headed east. Both sets of figures were decreasing. I overshot, the east reading went up. Back again. This row. This row. I peered through the twilight. At the far end was a group of people talking outside a tent lit by a yellow petrol lamp. I started to run, one eye on the tracker. I stumbled over guy-ropes, kicked cans, hurdled children, apologised to old women. The numbers clicked down, thirty five, thirty, twenty five metres… I could see this one figure in the group, back to me, dressed in purple combat gear. East zero. North twenty, eighteen… Short, female. Twelve, ten. Wore its hair in great soft spikes. Eight, six. I couldn’t make it past four. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. I was shaking.
Sensing me, the figure turned. The yellow light caught her.
‘Ten,’ I said. I saw fifty emotions on that face. Then she ran at me and I dropped the scanner and I lifted her and held her to me and no words of mine, or anyone else’s, I think, can say how I felt then.
NOW our lives and stories and places come together, and my tale moves to its conclusion.
I believe that people and their feelings write themselves on space and time. That is the only way I can explain how I knew, even before I turned and saw him there in that camp, that it was Sean, that he had searched for me, and found me. I tell you, that is some thing to know that another person has done for you. I saw him, and it was like the world had set laws about how it was to work for me, and then suddenly it said, no, I break them now, for you, Tendeléo, because it pleases me. He was impossible, he changed everything I knew, he was there.
Too much joy weeps. Too much sorrow laughs.
He took me back to his hotel. The staff looked hard at me as he picked up his keycard from the lobby. They knew what I was. They did not dare say anything. The white men in the bar also turned to stare. They too knew the meaning of the colours I wore.
He took me to his room. We sat on the verandah with beer. There was a storm that night—there is a storm most nights, up in the high country—but it kept itself in the west among the Nandi Hills. Lightning crawled between the clouds, the distant thunder rattled our beer bottles on the iron table. I told Sean where I had been, what I had done, how I had lived. It was a story long in the telling. The sky had cleared, a new day was breaking by the time I finished it. We have always told each other stories, and each other’s stories.
He kept his questions until the end. He had many, many of them.
‘Yes, I suppose, it is like the old slave underground railroads,’ I answered one.
‘I still don’t understand why they try to stop people going in.’
‘Because we scare them. We can build a society in there that needs nothing from them. We challenge everything they believe. This is the first century we have gone into where we have no ideas, no philosophies, no beliefs. Buy stuff, look at stuff. That’s it. We are supposed to build a thousand years on that? Well, now we do. I tell you, I’ve been reading, learning stuff, ideas, politics. Philosophy. It’s all in there. There are information storage banks the size of skyscrapers, Sean. And not just our history. Other people, other races. You can go into them, you can become them, live their lives, see things through their senses. We are not the first. We are part of a long, long chain, and we are not the end of it. The world will belong to us; we will control physical reality as easily as computers control information.’
‘Hell, never mind the UN…you scare me, Ten!’
I always loved it when he called me Ten. Il Primo, Top of the Heap, King of the Hill, A-Number-One.
Then he said, ‘and your family?’
‘Little Egg is in a place called Kilandui. It’s full of weavers, she’s a weaver. She makes beautiful brocades. I see her quite often.’
‘And your mother and father?’
‘I’ll find them.’
But to most of his questions, there was only one answer: ‘Come, and I will show you.’ I left it to last. It rocked him as if he had been struck.
‘You are serious.’
‘Why not? You took me to your home once. Let me take you to mine. But first, it’s a year… And so so much…’
He picked me up.
‘I like you in this combat stuff,’ he said.
We laughed a lot and remembered old things we had forgotten. We slowly shook off the rust and the dust, and it was good, and I remember the room maid opening the door and letting out a little shriek and going off giggling.
Sean once told me that one of his nation’s greatest ages was built on those words, why not? For a thousand years Christianity had ruled England with the question: ‘Why?’ Build a cathedral, invent a science, write a play, discover a new land, start a business: ‘why?’ Then came the Elizabethans with the answer: ‘Why not?’
I knew the old Elizabethan was thinking, why not? There are only numbers to go back to, and benefit traps, and an old, grey city, and an old, grey dying world, a safe world with few promises. Here there’s a world to be made. Here there’s a future of a million years to be shaped. Here there are a thousand different ways of living together to be designed, and if they don’t work, roll them up like clay and start again.
I did not hurry Sean for his answer. He knew as well as I that it was not a clean decision. It was lose a world, or lose each other. These are not choices you make in a day. So, I enjoyed the hotel. One day I was having a long bath. The hotel had a great bathroom and there was a lot of free stuff you could play with, so I abused it. I heard Sean pick up the phone. I could not make out what he was saying, but he was talking for some time. When I came out he was sitting on the edge of the bed with the telephone beside him. He sat very straight and formal.
‘I called Jean-Paul,’ he said. ‘I gave him my resignation.’
Two days later, we set out for the Chaga. We went by matatu. It was a school holiday, the Peugeot Services were busy with children on their way back to their families. They made a lot of noise and energy. They looked out the corners of their eyes at us and bent together to whisper. Sean noticed this.
‘They’re talking about you,’ Sean said.
‘They know what I am, what I do.’
One of the schoolgirls, in a black and white uniform, understood our English. She fixed Sean a look. ‘She is a warrior,’ she told him. ‘She is giving us our nation back.’
We left most of the children in Kapsabet to change on to other matatus; ours drove on into the heart of the Nandi Hills. It was a high, green rolling country, in some ways like Sean’s England. I asked the driver to stop just past a metal cross that marked some old road death.
‘What now?’ Sean said. He sat on the small pack I had told him was all he could take.
‘Now, we wait. They won’t be long.’
Twenty cars went up the muddy red road, two trucks, a country bus and medical convoy went down. Then they came out of the darkness between the trees on the other side of the road like dreams out of sleep: Meji, Naomi and Hamid. They beckoned: behind them came men, women, children…entire families, from babes in arms to old men; twenty citizens, appearing one by one out of the dark, looking nervously up and down the straight red road, then crossing to the other side.
I fived with Meji, he looked Sean up and down.
‘This is the one?’
‘This is Sean.’
‘I had expected something, um…’
‘Whiter?’
He laughed. He shook hands with Sean and introduced himself. Then Meji took a tube out of his pocket and covered Sean in spray. Sean jumped back, choking.
‘Stay there, unless you want your clothes to fall off you when you get inside,’ I said.
Naomi translated this for the others. They found it very funny. When he had immunised Sean’s clothes, Meji sprayed his bag.
‘Now, we walk,’ I told Sean.
We spent the night in the Chief’s house in the village of Senghalo. He was the last station on our railroad. I know from my Dust Girl days you need as good people on th
e outside as the inside. Folk came from all around to see the black Englishman. Although he found being looked at intimidating, Sean managed to tell his story. I translated. At the end the crowd outside the Chief’s house burst into spontaneous applause and finger-clicks.
‘Aye, Tendeléo, how can I compete?’ Meji half-joked with me.
I slept fitfully that night, troubled by the sound of aircraft moving under the edge of the storm.
‘Is it me?’ Sean said.
‘No, not you. Go back to sleep.’
Sunlight through the bamboo wall woke us. While Sean washed outside in the bright, cold morning, watched by children curious to see if the black went all the way down, Chief and I tuned his shortwave to the UN frequencies. There was a lot of chatter in Klingon. You Americans think we don’t understand Star Trek?
‘They’ve been tipped off,’ Chief said. We fetched the equipment from his souterrain. Sean watched Hamid, Naomi, Meri and I put on the communicators. He said nothing as the black-green knob of cha-plastic grew around the back of my head, into my ear, and sent a tendril to my lips. He picked up my staff.
‘Can I?’
‘It won’t bite you.’
He looked closely at the fist-sized ball of amber at its head, and the skeleton outline of a sphere embedded in it.
‘It’s a buckyball.’ I said. ‘The symbol of our power.’
He passed it to me without comment. We unwrapped our guns, cleaned them, checked them and set off. We walked east that day along the ridges of the Nandi Hills, through ruined fields and abandoned villages. Helicopter engines were our constant companions. Sometimes we glimpsed them through the leaf cover, tiny in the sky like black mosquitoes. The old people and the mothers looked afraid. I did not want them to see how nervous they were making me. I called my colleagues apart.
‘They’re getting closer.’
Hamid nodded. He was a quiet, thin twenty-two year old… Ethiopian skin, goatee, a political science graduate from the university of Nairobi.
‘We choose a different path every time,’ he said. ‘They can’t know this.’