Zanzibar

by Giles Foden

  ‘I thought’, said Nick, ‘that I might go and camp out on Lyly for a bit – if you don’t mind, that is. Reckoned I’d fix up that house. Live there for a week or two. Get some real study done on the turtles.’

  ‘I don’t mind,’ said Leggatt. ‘It’s not my place to mind – frankly I’d welcome a bit of a break from keeping an eye on them. Strictly speaking the house is owned by an Arab as I said, but he’s never there. It’s ages since I’ve seen anyone go there. There’s some African family from the main island who visit from time to time. Saw them out there once. Father and son. But that was … goodness, it must be seven or eight years ago now. You could probably get away with it.’

  He refreshed their drinks then, and began telling stories of fishing trips of the past.

  ‘Before I came out here, we used to fish Mafia Island in the channel. You could get everything. Wahoo, black marlin, bluefin tunny … even sharks, white-tips. Sometimes the sharks would take the fish off the line and all you would get was the severed tunny head. But then the dynamite fishing started and you didn’t see so much.’

  Nick remembered the white expanse of smashed dead coral. In Florida, too, he had seen dead corals, damaged by the anchors and keels of tourist boats, or bleached from pollution. All that was just as bad over time, but the effect of the dynamite was far more dramatic.

  ‘You’d think the authorities would do more about it,’ he said, distractedly, suddenly thinking about home. Ma. He ought to write her soon.

  ‘They used to,’ said Leggatt, knocking out his pipe in a flurry of sparks. ‘Here as well, before Chikambwa was in charge. They once machine-gunned the canoes of some dynamite fishers, which was perhaps a little de trop. But now it’s open house. They’re even mining coral for building materials.’

  At that point the cook brought in the barracuda and they moved to a table behind a screen woven from coconut leaves. To Nick’s surprise, the cook shook out the thick pink napkins and placed them on their laps personally before serving the fish. Cut into slices and grilled, accompanied by rice and salad, it looked delicious. Already planning his sojourn on Lyly, Nick followed Leggatt’s suit in dabbing the rice with tabasco sauce, then picked up his knife and fork and, faltering only when one of the thin little bones caught in his teeth, set to consuming his late adversary. It tasted just as good as it looked.

  Afterwards, Leggatt took him round the spice farm, which involved a bracing climb into the terraces behind the house. It was strange to see exotic spices like nutmeg and coriander and cumin, which one normally saw in packets, growing like that. There were also peanuts and sesame plants there. But mostly the plantations were cloves. The pungent scent of these wasn’t so noticeable outside, but when Leggatt took him down to the drying shed, it was overpowering, even at the doorway.

  Nick took a deep breath and stepped inside. In the darkness, he could just make out long mats with the cloves spread on them. But the aroma, catching at his throat and making his eyes run, soon forced him back outside.

  ‘Too much for you, eh?’ chuckled Leggatt. ‘You should stay in here awhile, it’s good for the tubes.’

  A young African, who must have been in the very depths of the shed, emerged from the shadows after them. His eyes were redraw with clove vapour. Nick recognised him as the poacher’s boy.

  ‘I gave him a job,’ explained Leggatt, gruffly. ‘Didn’t I, Sayeed?’

  ‘Yes, bwana,’ said the boy, grinning broadly and wiping his streaming nose on the back of his hand.

  Nick nodded at him and then, leaning against the edge of the shed, saw something that made his heart leap. It was an old green motorbike.

  ‘That bike –’ he said, turning to Leggatt. ‘I don’t suppose you want to sell it?’

  Leggatt laughed, throwing back his yellow hair. ‘That old thing? I haven’t used it in years. You’re welcome to it if you can get it going – though I doubt you’ll find any parts, and it’ll surely need some. It’s a Norton.’

  Nick, ever the optimist, tried to turn the throttle, but it hardly moved.

  ‘Best British bike ever made. Bought it off a fellow called Mike Drayton in Malawi. Chancellor of Zomba University no less. I’ve a helmet somewhere, too. You can have that as well, if I can find it.’

  They dragged out the bike and, with much difficulty, pushed it over to Leggatt’s workshop.

  ‘Do you think you’ll ever go back?’ Nick asked as he bent over the old machine, trying to undo the fuel cap.

  ‘To England you mean?’

  ‘Yes. Don’t you miss it?’

  Leggatt gazed out to sea, as if looking for the answer. He shook his dirty locks.

  ‘Not now. Wasn’t there much, anyway, except when I was young. And last time I was back it seemed a pretty poorly place.’

  ‘Have you got any oil? The cap’s stuck.’

  ‘Up there on the bench. That was the seventies.’

  ‘That’s nearly thirty years!’

  ‘Yes. I suppose it is.’

  The nozzle of the oil can was covered with dead flies. Nick brushed them off and began squirting oil on the fuel cap of the Norton. He smiled to himself as Leggatt continued speaking. The old guy, he was nice really. As fouled up as his oil can, but interesting, and funny. The way he talked – that English accent of his – it was entertaining to listen to, regardless of what he was saying.

  Above him, Leggatt took a tobacco-stained handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose.

  ‘It’ll ease if you let it sit a while. No, I’ll stay put. I’ve got – what? – ten years at most to master my fate, before I go gaga. Then I might go home. In a zinc-lined coffin. My dreadful relatives can fight over my will like dogs over a bone.’

  He gave a loud cackle. ‘I’ve told them there’ll be millions. Zambian silver! Malawi gold!’

  ‘I thought that was a type of marijuana,’ Nick said.

  ‘You’re looking at the man who gave it that name. Never got into smuggling that though, even if it is the best hemp known to man or beast. Did you know that chimpanzees eat it when they’ve got a wound?’

  He sighed, and blew his nose again.

  ‘No, not with President Banda about. He’d have strung us up. Knew someone who that happened to actually. No, I was just a private smoker. I liked to think of myself as a connoisseur. Gave it up a few years back. There was this particular devil kept following me around.’

  ‘DEA?’

  Leggatt looked down at him, puzzled, then burst out laughing. ‘You mean the drugs squad? No: an imaginary devil. An hallucination. A shade. Dope!’

  For a second, Nick thought he was addressing him, then realised Leggatt was explaining the genesis of his demon.

  ‘He looked rather like my dear departed dad, as a matter of fact. Except he was black as your hat, and that would have been difficult considering that his father fought for the Afrikaners in the Boer War – traitor to dear old Albion, I’m afraid, poorly even then. And afterwards his son grew up more in love with apartheid than the Dutchmen were.’

  Nick, lost again, glanced up at him quizzically. Leggatt winked, and patted his pockets for his tobacco pouch.

  ‘My pop I mean. Am I rambling? I’m telling you it exactly as it happened. We’ve always been a bad lot, till I came along. Beat the hell out of me. I jumped ship from South Africa and from him when Vorster came in. Headed home, by which I mean England. Took a degree at the Canford School of Mines, worked in Cornwall till that went down the pan, then came back out here. Or hereabouts.’

  ‘Tanzania you mean?’

  Leggatt frowned, looking into his tobacco pouch.

  ‘Well, first it was Zambia. Up at Ndola. Copper and silver. Then Malawi. Copper and gold. I was nearly twenty years there. That was where I got into the boats. On the lake. This place, and the Winston, they were my retirement present to myself. The farm is just a hobby really.’

  He sighed again, looking rather sombre.

  ‘This isn’t coming,’ said Nick, whose new acquisition contin
ued to frustrate him. ‘Hey, what if we use that blowtorch? You know … heat expands.’

  Leggatt favoured him with a look that garnered the full remaining potency of English disdain.

  ‘Brilliant idea.’ He paused to light his pipe. ‘If you want to blow us up. OK, I haven’t used it for a decade, but there could still be remnants of fuel in the tank.’

  Nick blushed. ‘You’re right. Dumb idea.’

  He continued trying to twist off the fuel cap, using up a bit of rag to give him more purchase.

  ‘You must have made quite a bit of money to buy this place and the yacht too.’

  ‘Ah, yes. The fabulous riches, explanation of. Diamonds is the answer. I hit the jackpot in Sierra Leone in the early eighties. Myself and a chap called Bailey – well done that man!’

  The fuel cap had finally given. As if it contained the mystery of all things, from the trees and flowers, to the stars and atoms, to the infinite duration of eternity itself, Nick peered into the ancient tank.

  10

  Incident report #1: Miranda Powers

  The alternate security guard (Juma Bagaya) reported to me the following. At approx. 0234 hours on Monday morning 04/05/98, he noticed two youths in their late teens in the motor pool. One with a bomber jacket, the other with a kikoi tied round his waist. One of the youths was tampering with the driver-side window of an automobile.

  Juma pressed the alarm to alert the Marine Security Guard and proceeded outside with his weapon, having first turned on the spotlights. But by this stage the youths had already run across the pool and he could not see on account of the lights reflecting off the vehicles.

  By the time the marine (Corporal Rossetti) arrived from his post, the youths had climbed over the wall and were running up Laibon Road. Police were called and arrived within fifteen minutes of the phone call.

  Corporal Rossetti checked camera B2, which was on rotate at the time, but the incident was not covered.

  Action taken: I sent a memo to John Herlihy asking if the technical department could fit some kind of filtering device to the lights in the motor pool.

  Incident report #2: Miranda Powers

  Approx 1530 Wednesday 10/06/98 the rear guard (Innocent Phiri) reported a burning smell coming from the air-conditioning fans by the generator in the yard behind chancery. I phoned John Herlihy and informed him of the situation. He came down and the two of us proceeded to the yard. JH turned off one of the fans by the isolator switches, as this seemed to be the cause of the smell – the fan motor was overheating, John said.

  We returned to our respective offices. After fifteen minutes a humidity alarm sounded in the south computer room due to the fact that the fan had been turned off. We went back down to the fans. John said the fan would have to be replaced, but that it was in fact best to turn it back on now since it would turn off automatically if it overheated dangerously.

  Action taken: fan in question to be replaced, occasional checks to be made on temperature in south computer room.

  Incident report #3: Miranda Powers

  At approx 1032 Friday 07/07/98 the alternate security guard (Juma Bagaya) called me to say a man was video-taping the gate near his post. I went down myself at once, but the man had gone by the time I arrived.

  Juma had approached the man, he said, and asked him what he was doing. The man had replied he was a tourist and shortly afterwards continued on his way down Laibon Road. Juma said the man was brown-skinned and about five foot six and dressed in slacks, a collared shirt and a baseball cap with the words ‘SPORT TEAM OSNABRÜCK’ on it. He was unable to give any exact racial description except to say the man was ‘not African’.

  For the record I note that Juma is honest and I believe his account. However, he does lack analytical acuity and I would not recommend him for promotion to senior alternate guard.

  As it turned out, the man was partially captured on camera B2 during its rotate, but his face was obscured by his own camera and then a bus passed.

  Action taken: none.

  11

  Zanzibar … The name itself, languid and conspiratorial, was a kind of illusion. It seemed to speak of the heart’s desire, of that yearning for paradise which is itself a sign we are fallen – that we are in the dirty realm of history, of actuality, of fact. The state of disgrace is not one of which we like to be reminded. It was little wonder, then, that when Nick – later in his stay and brown as a nut – saw Clinton on the television again, he turned it off and headed back to his room.

  Having let himself in, he fiddled with the array of switches till he had the two bedside lamps on and the centre one off. It brought in the mosquitoes: there were enough tears in the grille already without making it easier for them. The walls were decorated with a much larger number of yellow sponges now. The America the Beautiful calendar had turned on a page – colour-enhanced Tranquillity Base – and the place smelled like a locker room. It was more untidy, too, not least through the addition of some underwater breathing apparatus he’d rented from a man called Turtle Mo. He was still waiting for his own sub-aqua gear to arrive. Dino, whose Drew Barrymore postcard now sported three Olympian coffee rings, had sworn blind on the telephone that the gear had been sent. But Nick was beginning to wonder.

  He sniffed. The place really did smell. He turned on the fan, which started with its usual eastern-mystic om-mmm routine, and then went over to the window to let in some fresh air. The culprit, what was making the room smell so badly, was his wetsuit. Arms stretched out as if crucified, it was hung on the wall, drying from that morning’s expedition with Turtle Mo’s tank.

  He pulled off his T-shirt. It hadn’t been much help, Mo’s antiquated machine, which was really just an old reserve one, hooked up to an emergency mouthpiece. The mixture was slightly off and the supply tube leaked badly. In the end he’d just had to dive down holding his breath, like the Greek sponge diver his great-grandfather had been, so his father said.

  Nick wondered how much of great-grandfather Karolides’s lung capacity had come down to him. He’d found it difficult to stay down for very long. He’d hoped to attach numbered identification tags to a pair of breeding lobsters in a cavity at the bottom of the reef, but would have to wait until his own apparatus arrived – by which time, he reflected, they would probably have moved on.

  Or been caught and boiled. Going through into the bathroom and turning on the tap, he thought of Turtle Mo again, imagining his big brown hand reaching for a lobster claw – perhaps even the same one that had waved at him from the coral cavity that morning, as he’d hovered there with his bursting lungs and a handful of steel tags. As if to say: you’re not putting one of those on me!

  The lobsters’ tendrils, coiled up and moving in the water, swaying in the eddies, had made the entrance to their little cave seem like a kind of radio antenna. That was what he remembered thinking at the time, but now they transmitted a different message to his mind. It came to him with a slight pang while he was brushing his teeth. The lobsters’ home, with the two of them just sitting there, was such an appealing scene of domesticity that he suddenly felt a bit lonely. Maybe he should try to get himself a girlfriend? He twisted as he brushed, looking at his torso in the mirror and thinking it over. He spat pink into the sink. He did not like clove-flavoured toothpaste at all – the tube he’d brought having long since run out, he’d had to buy local.

  He went back through to the bedroom and, taking off his shorts, lay down, thinking about the tank. The sign above Turtle Mo’s shop had read ‘M. Gandhi Trading Pty’. A famous East African trawler baron whose freezer depots were dotted right down the coast, he originally came from Durban. Mo claimed descent from the great Indian leader through a rogue line established by Gandhi during his South African days, before his time of greater celebrity in India.

  Nick doubted whether it was true. Large and bearded, Mo certainly didn’t look like Gandhi, not like he was in the film anyhow. Nor did his booming voice, heavy gold watch, and the half bottle of brandy and box of c
igars that had been on his desk when Nick went to see him suggest that Mo had inherited any of his reputed ancestor’s self-denial.

  As well as trawlers and fish-freezing plants, Mo had interests in everything to do with the sea in Zanzibar, from the export of salt – which villagers brought to him from the pans in wonderful, asteroid-like lumps and he sent in hessian bags to Dar – to the import of marine engines, small ones for outboards and big ones for trawlers. Mo also had a few cargo ships of his own.

  *

  His eyes found the wall. An image. Neil and Buzz bouncing about. On Tranquillity Base. On the calendar. On the moon.

  It was his earliest memory, his father holding him and pointing at the television, saying: ‘Remember this … this is history being made.’ He would only have been something like two years old at the time – too young to take in the significance of such an event, or even understand what his father was saying – so he reckoned this must have been related to him later. But he certainly remembered something.

  Tranquillity Base. It sounded neat, he thought. So did Lyly. Lala. Meaning sleep. The island of sleep, to which he kept meaning to return. He had been delaying because he wanted to explore it with his own scuba equipment, rather than spoil the experience by using the shoddy stuff Turtle Mo had supplied. In some ways he didn’t mind having to wait. The island had taken up a place of special importance in his mind – it was beginning to oust Zanzibar itself as the focus of his interest. Going there for a spell would, he told himself, be all the better for the anticipation. In his imagination, Lyly now sat alongside that volume of Greek myths and history, simplified for children, which his father used to read him. Lyly, or the idea of Lyly, put him in mind of some of the stories: Odysseus stranded on the island with Calypso; Aphrodite, the love goddess born of the foam of the sea; Delphi and its mysteries, the sacred groves where time appeared to stand still peacefully.