by Ian McDonald
The crowds were denser closer to the town centre. Bodies squeezed the ATV tight. The heel of Gaby’s hand never left the horn. She imagined she could smell sweet-sour fear-sweat blowing through the air-conditioning vents. A cute Azeri boy-trooper with acne pressed hands and face to the driver’s window, licked the glass, rolled his eyes.
‘Fuck off,’ Gaby growled, heart hammering in case he should catch sight of the treachery in the back seat.
‘Oh, you beautiful boy!’ Faraway exclaimed, snapping his fingers in delight. ‘He has got an officer! Contact! The officer is asking him if has any money.’
‘They don’t believe in beating about the bush,’ Gaby said.
‘I do,’ Faraway said, radiantly happy. ‘I will beat any bush with you, Gaby. William is offering him the thousand shillings. It is right in front of the lens. Tembo, my brother, your wife’s sister-in-law’s cousin raised smart children. Oh, this is beautiful. They have taken the money, but they think because he has a thousand shillings to give away, he may have more. They are asking to see what else he has. Give them the disc player, William. I wonder, Tembo, was your wife’s sister-in-law’s cousin ever in Nairobi? Maybe there is some Faraway in him. He is clever and handsome enough. Go on, take it. Made in Japan. Not European Union rubbish. Yes, they like it. That will do them very nicely, thank you William. Now, just give him the paper, and take him through to the trucks. Why will you not do this? Give him the paper, he has given you all he has, greedy m’zungu’.
‘I do not like this,’ Tembo said. ‘Can we get closer?’
‘I’ll try,’ Gaby said. ‘But these crowds.’ Do not think of the annihilation of the mob, she told herself as she navigated the ATV closer.
‘Oh Jesus Mister Christ,’ Faraway said.
Gaby glanced at the monitor. The picture was badly broken, as if the shoulder bag were being shaken violently.
‘I see them!’ Tembo shouted. He was on the edge of his seat with worry. William and the Azeri officer were playing tug-of-war with the bag containing the camera and transmitter. William turned, saw the electric blue ATV, looked right at the white woman driving it. Gaby could hear his cry for help inside and outside the four by four.
‘Jesus. We’re rumbled.’
The officer stared at Gaby with a look that passed from recognition to comprehension to hatred in a few muscle twitches. Exactly the look Raymond Burr gave in Rear Window when he rumbled Jimmy Stewart. She knew her father’s old video collection too well to have forgotten what happened next.
Tembo heaved the big heavy camcorder out of the back, switched it on and brought it to bear on the officer. The officer’s hand had been straying to his sidearm. The watching eye of the world kept it safe in its holster. In the moment’s diversion William twisted free from the officer and fled through the crowd, leaving behind the shoulder bag with the clever little camera and cleverer little transmitter. Faraway put his hands on his head in despair. It was only partly for the loss of expensive equipment.
Gaby floored the accelerator. People parted before the ATV like the waters before Moses. They passed the stunned officer, they passed the running William. Faraway flung open the rear door, seized William’s wrist and pulled him ungently in. The open door flapped wildly on its hinges. Evacuees jumped back.
‘Move move move!’ Gaby screamed at them. They moved moved moved. It was better than death. She threw the wheel from side to side, dodging by instinct alone. The loom of faces places objects was absurdly like a computer game. Only game over is gang rape if you are lucky, a bullet in the back of the head and every vulture for fifty kays around coming to the wake if you are not, she thought. The sweat she could now smell in the car was her own. Fat drops rolled coldly down the sides of her body.
She heard Tembo’s cry and spun the wheel without looking. There was a loud bang. The car lurched as it ran over something. In her wing mirror Gaby saw a dog spin across the road. Intestines sprayed from its burst stomach. Gaby wailed. The back door was still swinging and banging. Faraway did not dare risk his fingers trying to catch it.
William pushed his head between the front seats.
‘Go right here,’ he said. ‘There is an earth road goes west into the valley of the Kiboko, and then south to the Chaga.’
‘I don’t want to be anywhere near the Chaga.’
‘They will have blocks up on the roads north and east.’
Gaby slammed the Nissan into four-wheel-drive and swung off the road. The car shook. Speed on the earth road was like driving on corrugated iron. She could barely hold the wheel steady. Now we will see how good the manufacturer’s promises are, Gaby thought. Cars with factory test-to-destruction ratings of five years fell apart after ten months on East Africa’s laterite roads. You’re a long way from sweet home Yokohama now, little Nissan. God, they can probably see my dust trail from the moon. Why is it the thing you feel worst about is the dog? It was only a poor dumb mutt and if you hadn’t burst its guts it would just have been run over by a truck or left to starve in the Chaga or maybe some soldier would have taken pity on it and blasted its brains out with his AK47. So why does thinking about it spinning across the road make you want to cry? Maybe it is not the dog you are crying for, but your brilliant career that got left with tyre tracks across its belly in the middle of the Merueshi road.
Faraway stuck his face between the headrests.
‘I think it might be a good idea to go a little faster.’
‘Not without flipping this thing right over.’
‘I think you should reconsider, because I think hell is coming after us. There are two armoured personnel carriers on your tail.’
She spared a glance in the rearview mirror. A mile down the tracks were two rising plumes of dust, each with a white speck at its head.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ she moaned.
‘I know you do not believe in it, but I am praying to God for our deliverance,’ Tembo said.
‘You’ll do better than God. You’ll get on the cellphone to T.P. Costello and tell him to call the UNHCR or UNECTA or whoever the hell runs this show down here and tell them that we know what’s going on and they’d better leave us alone.’
The dirt road fought Gaby like it was trying to steal her car. Muscles were knotted up and down her bare arms with the intensity of the struggle.
‘I am afraid we are probably out of range of the cell network,’ William said coolly.
‘Well, that is just wonderful,’ Gaby said. ‘Just fucking wonderful.’
‘They do not seem to be gaining on us,’ Faraway said, peering out the still-open door and the dust billowing into the ATV. A small herd of Thompson’s gazelles scattered in every direction from Gaby’s killing wheels.
Faraway spoke something short and savage in Luo then said in English, ‘I regret to inform you that things have just become most serious.’
The helicopter came in a hammer of sound so low and loud everyone in the ATV ducked. The car plunged into a whirlwind of dust thrown up by the rotors. The helicopter turned in the air in front of them and hovered.
‘Go south!’ William shouted. ‘To the edge of the Chaga. They will not dare follow us there.’
Dare I lead them there? Gaby thought, activating the internal satellite tracker and flicking on the wipers to clear the dust-filmed windscreen.
Lazily, the helicopter drifted after them. It moved effortlessly across the sky, like a cheetah stalking a wounded impala, that the cheetah knows it can run down and kill when it finally tires of playing. Oksana had made sure that Gaby knew the specifications of every aircraft, military and civilian, in the East African theatre. Those black insect-things under the stub wings are air-to-surface missiles. That thin black proboscis is a chain-gun. Five hundred rounds a minute will shred you and your car and your friends and your story of a lifetime like pissed-on toilet paper. Five hundred rounds a minute, and all you have to bluff them with is to keep driving south, south, south.
The dirt road dissolved into high acacia plain. Flat dark
clouds were rolling down from the mothermass anchored to the distant mountain, spreading slowly out across the land that shivered like liquid with heat haze. Between the two ran a line of shadow: the edge of the Chaga. Terminum. Gaby McAslan drove straight into the line of darkness at one hundred kilometres per hour.
‘They are still with us,’ Faraway shouted from the back. Flirting, the helicopter swept in to harry the little car from the left and the right. It ducked down in front of it in a shatter of engines to try to get the driver to swerve. The driver did not swerve. She drove on to that line of darkness that minute by minute was emerging from the heat dazzle into shapes, silhouettes, seductions. Like a mirage, the Chaga deceived. Its trick was to play with space so that you were always nearer to it than you thought. The darkness Gaby saw lifting out of the heat-haze was not terminum. It was the great upthrust of life she had seen and marvelled at from the baobab on the Namanga road, that the researchers called the Great Wall. Terminum was elsewhere. Terminum was right in front of them. Terminum was under their wheels.
Gaby slammed to a stop. The helicopter passed raucously overhead and pulled a high gee turn.
‘We lost the APCs a kilometre back,’ Faraway reported.
Gaby did not hear him. She stared at the edge of the Chaga, one hundred metres in front of her. One hundred metres. Two days. If she sat in this seat and did not move, the Chaga would come to her, grow around and into and through her and take her to another world. She could step out of this car and walk to it and take off her clothes and lie down in it and feel it press into the skin of her back, like the old Vietnamese torture in which they tied people over bamboo and let it grow through them.
‘Gaby.’
‘The helicopter?’ she asked.
‘It’s standing off about half a kilometre west of us,’ Faraway said.
‘Go closer,’ William whispered. ‘Their guns and rockets can shoot a long way. Get as close as you dare.’
As close as she dared was fifty metres. The helicopter held its station, the black nose of its chain-gun locked on the beetle-blue ATV.
‘Closer,’ William whispered. Gaby moved the ATV in until she could smell the musky, fruity, sexy perfume of Chaga through the vents. The helicopter gingerly waltzed a little nearer.
‘Do these bastards not give up?’ Faraway asked.
‘Closer,’ William ordered a third time and this time Gaby drove until the pods and bulbs of Chaga-stuff popped beneath her tyres and the hexagonal mosaics cracked and spilled orange ichor that blossomed into helixes and coils of living polymer. The helicopter darted in, suddenly swung high in the air so that its rotors looked like the sails of a insane windmill, then spun away and receded across the Chyulu Plain and was seen and heard no more.
‘Yes!’ Faraway shouted. Tembo smiled like a man who knows his prayers have been answered. Gaby leaned forward until her forehead touched the top of the steering wheel and tried to stop her hands shaking.
‘Go west,’ William said ‘We should follow the edge until we come to the Olosinkiran road. They are South Africans over there. We can trust them.’
Gaby put her foot on the accelerator.
And the blue Nissan All Terrain Vehicle died.
‘Oh no,’ said Gaby McAslan, turning and turning and turning the ignition, pumping and pumping and pumping the gas pedal. The diesel pressure lamp glowed at her. ‘Oh no no no no no.’
Tembo got out and put up the hood. He beckoned to Gaby. Chaga-stuff crackled and burst beneath the soles of her boots. Strange pheromones challenged her.
‘I think we have a problem here.’
Compressor, fuel lines, cylinder head wore coats of tiny sulphur-yellow flowers, like miniature cauliflower buds. As Gaby watched, not wanting to believe what her eyes were showing her, the plague of flowers spread to the oil pump, oil filter and engine block. Tendrils were rising from the open flower heads on the cylinder block, waving sentiently in the sunlight. In under a minute the engine compartment was a pulp of pseudo-coral and oily metal. A sudden bang, like a shot. The fuel cap had blown off. Yellow fungus dripped from the fuel pipe. The body panels over the fuel tank were bowed out. The tyres popped little blue blooms around their rims. Something like crystalline rust was trying to work its way along the paintwork under the protective lacquer. Gaby yelped. The synthetic soles of her heavy-duty boots were blistering. There was man-made stretch fibre in her jodhpurs, in her underwear. It would eat that.
She should have obeyed T.P.’s panties catechism to the letter.
She jumped onto the hood of the ATV to get away from the treacherous earth.
‘What is the finance company going to say about this? I only just made the first payment.’
‘I do not think you are going to get much satisfaction from your insurers,’ Tembo said ruefully.
They were saying these little things because none of them dared think about the big things. At terminum. Angry Azerbaijanis behind them. Sixty kilometres of semi-desert on either side. No food. No water. No means of communication.
‘Shit! The disc!’
Tembo seized the camera and ran as fast as he could out of the Chaga into the virgin savannah. Gaby saw the flexible disc heliograph in the sun, Tembo unbutton his pants and then Faraway asked her to please spare his friend’s dignity.
‘Just pray his digestion is good today,’ he said.
The camera he brought back was a purulent mass of lichens and pseudo-fungi. Gaby winced at the SkyNet sticker on the side as responsibility went in and opened up inside her like the Gae Bolga of her childhood legends, the belly spear that unfolded a thousand barbs and tore out your guts. Mrs Tembo and Sarah and Etambele had waved their father off that morning and Gaby McAslan could not bear the responsibility that they might never be waving him home again. They could die out here, or be vanished by the UN, like Peter Werther, which is worse than dying to those who wait outside. She had put them all into this place and did not have an idea how to get them out.
‘Could we walk?’ she asked plaintively.
‘You tell us where, we will walk,’ Faraway said. ‘After all, it is only sixty kilometres.’
‘We have no water,’ Tembo said. ‘And Gaby would burn before she went ten kilometres. Also, we have no weapons.’
‘There are lions?’ Gaby asked.
‘Leopards are more common around the edges of the Chaga. But the biggest danger is from gangs of bandits who pick over the abandoned villages. We would be safer in the hands of the Azeris than the scavengers.’
Gaby wrapped her bare arms around her knees. Her shoulders were already starting to feel hot. The Chaga had risen to ankle height. Terminum was several metres north of them.
‘So what do you suggest we do?’ Gaby asked plaintively.
Tembo looked at her, the land, the Chaga, the sky.
‘I suggest we set fire to the car.’
‘The hell with that. I worked damn hard for this car.’
‘It is lost, Gaby. The column of smoke will be visible from a very great distance. UNECTA has Chaga Watch balloons every few kilometres. They would call in an airborne patrol.’
‘And if the military see it first? Or these scavengers?’
‘They are cowards,’ William said forcefully. ‘They would not dare go into the Chaga, soldiers or scavengers.’
Gaby watched the interior of her car break out into pin-head sized scarlet blisters.
‘Do it,’ she said. ‘Torch it.’ It was only a car. The Chaga could have it. The Chaga could have the clothes on her body and leave her naked and sunburned, as long as the disc Tembo had hidden in his rectum remained inviolate.
The men opened the doors. The red beads had swollen into orange puffballs that burst into clouds of peppery dust as Gaby rummaged in the back for her spare diesel can. The metal had resisted the spores, though the cap had wedged tight around a crust of saffron crystals. Faraway wrenched it off and gave Gaby the honour of liberally anointing her own car with fuel. Before the Chaga could devour the diesel, s
he lit a length of tattered handkerchief with her cigarette lighter and dropped it on the driver’s seat.
The car went up in a satisfying blossom of flame. The refugees started the short walk back to Kenya. By the time they found a place comfortably far from terminum to sit and wait the ATV was burning nicely in a gobble of fire and carcinogenic black thermoplastic smoke. Gaby watched it burn. Tembo had been right. It was lost to her already, but it is one thing to have it taken from you and another to have to give it away with your own hands.
‘How long do you think?’ she asked.
Tembo shrugged. The smoke coiled into a neat twister that leaned across the edgelands towards the east.
How much burning is there in one Nissan All Terrain Vehicle? Gaby thought, watching the paint blister and flake. She thought about fire, and she thought about fear, and in her extremity she saw the land beyond Scared, a calm and watered plain where you can watch twenty-five thousand pounds worth of car burn with equanimity, even serenity, because you understand that there is no point being scared any more because it cannot help you.
‘Do you want to play a game?’ she asked the men. ‘Kill the time. How about “I Spy”? I Spy with my little eye, something beginning with…’ She quested around for a mystery object.
‘“C”,’ Faraway said and that was the end of that game.
‘All right then, what’s the most frightened you’ve ever been?’ Without waiting for the men to agree to her time-killer, Gaby told about the time in her first year in London when she had been alone down in a tube station at midnight and a white boy with a Stanley knife had taken her money off her, and her cards, and her disc-player, and her expensive shoes though they neither fitted nor suited him and then told her he was going to cut long scars that would never heal properly across her cheeks and lips and forehead and breasts if she did not go down on her knees and suck his cock behind the defunct phonecard machine on the westbound platform and who ran off leaving her things when the last train came in a gust of electricity and hot air. She had gathered up all her things and when she got off at her stop, dumped the money and the cards and the disc-player and the expensive shoes and walked barefoot to her flat. They were polluted now. They were diseased. They would never lose the taint.