Chaga

by Ian McDonald

  ‘There was a fax waiting for me when I got out of the disciplinary hearing,’ Shepard said, very quietly. He did not move in his chair. He did not look at Gaby. He did not look away from her. He did not register anything on his field of vision. ‘It was from home. From my folks in Lincoln.

  ‘There was a car crash. In Santa Barbara. Carling was driving. Fraser is dead. Aaron is critical in intensive care. The car crossed the centre line—the police don’t know how yet—and hit an oncoming tanker. Carling always was a shit driver. She died instantly. Fraser was the front seat passenger. He always had to ride up front. Privilege of being oldest. They cut him out but he was dead by the time they got him to the hospital. Aaron suffered massive internal injuries. His back is broken. He may not live. If he does, it’s certain he will be paralysed from the waist down. One of my sons is dead, along with my ex-wife; the other is crippled. That is what happened to me today.’

  To Gaby, it was as if he had got out of his ugly leather chair, crossed the room and driven his fist wrist-deep into her belly. She could not breathe. She could not see. The world ceased to exist. She found herself standing against the wall, head thrown back.

  ‘Oh, dear Jesus, Shepard.’

  ‘Perhaps I could have borne it, perhaps in time I could look at the world around me again and see something good and rich, if there had been someone I could trust to hold me if I put my weight on her. Someone I put my life, my career, my personal and professional integrity on the line for, someone I made a dumb mistake for, once, that grew to devour me. Someone for whom I was prepared to crucify myself before the UNECTA General Council to save her from the consequences of her impetuosity, and when the General Council said no, compromised security by leaking the information to someone in a position to do something with it. But I’m stupid; you’ve told me that, you must be right. The world isn’t like that, is it? I lean, my support seems sound, I trust it with my full weight and it snaps and I fall.’ He stood up. The movement was as slow and precise as a piece of Japanese drama. ‘I’m going out now.’

  ‘Shepard!’ Gaby screamed.

  The living room door closed.

  ‘Shepard!’ she screamed again.

  The front door closed.

  ‘Shepard,’ a third time.

  The Mahindra’s door closed. She heard the engine start and saw the headlights swing across the curtains. Gaby threw her head back and howled like a dying animal.

  Finished.

  51

  Ring.

  Come on.

  Ring ring.

  Answer it.

  Ring ring ring. I know you’re there, it’s three-thirty in the morning, where else are you going to be?

  The mahogany door opened.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ Gaby asked the tall young black woman standing in the hall dressed in a hastily-wrapped kimono.

  ‘I live here,’ the woman said. ‘Who the hell are you?’

  Miriam Sondhai appeared behind her.

  ‘It’s all right. I will take care of this.’

  The young woman moved behind Miriam Sondhai but did not leave. She suspiciously studied Gaby with her arms full of crumpled star tapestry.

  ‘Miriam, it’s all over with Shepard. I can’t live with him any more, can I stay here?’

  ‘No.’

  Gaby’s foot had been over the threshhold.

  ‘What?’

  ‘No, you cannot come into my house,’ Miriam Sondhai said. ‘It is not open to those who abuse its trust. I know what you did, Gaby McAslan. You are not so clever as you think, nor I so stupid. My PDU logs outgoing and incoming calls. I know I am forgetful, but not so much as not to know when I go out running. You covered up too well; if you had made it a break-in, I would never have suspected, but there was only one person knew the alarm codes. Why did you have to deceive me? Why did you not ask me for this information?’

  ‘Would you have given it to me?’

  ‘So, because you are on the side of truth and right and good, that excuses it, does it?’

  ‘Miriam, I’m sorry.’

  ‘No, you are not. You would do it again if you had to. You would break into my house, hunt through all my private, personal things, abuse the trust I have put in you. Even now, you think you can turn up on my doorstep and imagine that it is all right for you to ask me for help because you think I do not know what you did.

  ‘Everything I entrusted to you, you abused. So, I will give you one last trust, and then I will not be afraid that you may abuse it, because there will be nothing more of me you can take. Listen, Gaby McAslan.

  ‘When I was eight, my mother’s mother came up from Chisimaio to mind me while my mother was at a conference in Cairo. I was happy to see her; I loved my grandmother. I was excited when she hired a taxi and took me into town. I thought we would go shopping. But we did not drive to the markets, or the streets where the foreigners bought things with dollars and Deutschmarks. She took me to a house in the suburbs beside an Islamic school. It was the house of the teaching mullah. My grandmother introduced me to him, told me he was a very holy man and that I must do whatever he said.

  ‘He took me into the kitchen and made me sit on the table. Then he made me pull up my skirt and he took a razor blade and cut off my clitoris. My grandmother kept saying that this was right, it was a good thing, now men would want me and I would make a good wife and bear many children. But it would not stop bleeding in the taxi, or in the house. My grandmother was scared, but she did not dare take me to the hospital because my father would learn what she had done while I had been entrusted to her care. She wrapped sheets around me to stop the bleeding, but it would not stop and she got really frightened and ran away. The cook found me when she came in to make the dinner and took me to my father’s hospital. He called my mother, she came back on the first flight from Cairo to comfort me, but what is cut away can never be put back. Female circumcision had been the way in my mother’s family; her mother had done it to her, and she had sworn that it would never happen to her daughter. But she had been betrayed by the person she trusted. She never saw or spoke to her mother after that. On her dying bed the old woman called for my mother to forgive her, but she would not come to see her. My grandmother died unforgiven.’

  The young woman put a hand on Miriam’s shoulder.

  ‘I was a child; I loved my grandmother. I trusted her. She took me to a man who mutilated me with a razor blade on a kitchen table. What you have done to me is no different, Gaby McAslan.’

  Miriam Sondhai turned away. The housemate looked at Gaby as if she were something that had died in the porch, then closed the heavy mahogany door.

  ‘Fuck you, Ms Pure and Perfect!’ Gaby shouted. ‘And your fucking lesbian girlfriend too! You’re not going to get very far with her with no fucking clitoris! I don’t need you! I don’t need any of you!’

  She blared the car horn peevishly all the way down the drive and along Nkrumah Avenue. It left a high-pitched echo in her head: the sound of it all coming apart. She had always thought it would all come apart with a rending crash, or an avalanche thunder, not this constant hiss of everything being destroyed atom by atom. She pushed the Landcruiser faster, faster along Nairobi’s boulevards, trying to outrun it, but you cannot drive faster than what is in your inner ear.

  She cried aloud and spun the wheel. The Landcruiser shuddered. She kicked in four-wheel-drive and went up and over the central strip on to the other roadway. When it comes apart, down in the molecules, you need magic to put it back together. You need the person who told you she would be there when it all came down.

  The house was a prefabricated hut set in a long row of identical temporary housing that had inevitably become permanent. Gaby could not decipher the Cyrillic name boards, but the bunches of dried herbs and sets of wind-chimes hanging from the guttering identified the bungalow. Contrail-streaked dawn was filling up the land as she tentatively knocked on the door.

  ‘Oksana, it’s finished.’

  ‘Gaby. Oh my God
. Come in come in come in.’

  She made tea with big whacks of vodka in it. She let Gaby rant and swear and cry and spill it out on her coir matting. She let her wear herself out with the telling of it, and then put her to bed with a sleeping pill. A timeless time later Gaby awoke, as the troubled wake in defiance of all chemical assistance, hoping that it was reality that was the dream, and that she had woken into the way things were truly meant to be. But it was not, because it is never is and never can be.

  52

  Dogs will bark in the night before an earthquake.

  Sometimes, just before your world is hit by lightning, you are allowed to hear the rumble of the approaching storm.

  It was in the face of Joshua the doorman.

  It was in the faces of the people in the elevator—more assiduously avoiding eye contact than usual.

  It was in the Germans by the window and the Scandinavians in Gloom Corner and the Eng. Langs, in the middle.

  It was in Tembo and Faraway looking up from their desk. It was in Abigail Santini’s certain smile as she brushed past. It was most of all in T.P. Costello’s looking up, scared and guilty in his glass cubicle.

  Because you can hear the coming thunder does not mean you can avoid the blast, any more than the barking dogs can stop your house falling into the chasm.

  ‘Gaby.’ T.P. came into the news room. ‘A wee word in my office.’

  They all followed her with their eyes. T.P. closed the door and perched on the edge of his untidy desk.

  ‘T.P., if it’s about that report, I’m sorry if I screwed up your syndication deals, but yesterday didn’t feature for me: to be honest, Shepard and me had a big fight. Totally honest, Shepard and me are finished. I’ve been staying with Oksana; that’s why you couldn’t get in touch with me. I can do the voice-over today; hell, I’d love to, give me something to take my mind off things.’ She saw T.P. was fidgeting with and repeatedly glancing at a piece of paper on his desk-top. ‘T.P., what is that that’s so interesting?’

  ‘It’s a fax from UNECTA Administration Headquarters. It concerns you.’

  And then the storm breaks, and it is not thunder at all, but that entropic inner-ear whine of molecules breaking apart and whirling away.

  ‘I’m sorry, Gab. My hands are tied. I can’t fight this, not without putting everything at risk.’

  ‘What is happening, T.P.? Tell me.’

  ‘They want you out. Forty-eight hours to leave UNECTAfrique’s field of operations.’

  And when the silent lightning strikes, it goes straight and sharp through the heart and nothing survives.

  ‘Oh Jesus, T.P..’

  ‘They’re getting their revenge for the Unit 12 exposé. The UN need a sacrificial goat to show the Brownnosers in the National Assembly they still have balls. Dr Dan’s swimming for his life in the political feeding frenzy and you’re a soft target. M’zungu. Filthy hack. Woman. Persona non grata. Of course, it’s voiced in the most diplomatic language, but the iron fist is that they may have to “re-evaluate their position vis à vis the international media presence”. In plain English, either you walk, or every news network gets its UN accreditation rescinded, UNECTA puts on the Great Stone face and they end up squabbling for the odd press release and maybe a conference for Ramadan, Yom Kippur and Christmas. My hands are tied, Gaby. I can’t be the man who sinks the entire East African operation.’

  ‘My God. I knew I hurt Shepard bad, but I never had him down for a vindictive bastard.’

  ‘Shepard resigned as Executive Peripatetic Secretary yesterday. Word on the inside is he jumped before he was pushed: an internal enquiry reported that while he couldn’t be directly connected to your investigation into Unit 12, his relationship with you made him a significant security risk. In fact, he had already committed several breaches of protocol and privilege.’

  Gaby closed her eyes.

  ‘Can’t you bargain with these people, T.P.? I can’t lose this now, not like this.’

  ‘I’ve been haggling like a Moore Street fish-wife,’ T.P. said. ‘This is their best offer. They wanted you not just out of Kenya, but out of SkyNet. But for the fact that our beloved proprietor, Cap’n Bill, gets wet every time he sees you on screen and wants to suck your toes, you’d be finished as a journalist, here or anywhere. What would you be?’

  Finished, T.P. But I already know this.

  ‘What am I going to do?’ she said.

  ‘Well, for a start, you’ve got forty-eight hours, so earn what I pay you. Give two fingers to UNECTAfrique. Finish that report. Give all those interviews I have so painstakingly lined up for you. Clear your desk and walk out of this building with a “Fuck-you-honey” look on your face, like the billion dollar babe you are.’

  ‘T.P., you talk the biggest load of oul’ shite.’

  But she did what he said. She finished her final report, and though it didn’t change anything or make anything any easier, she managed to feel about a couple of hundred thousand dollars as she tucked the cardboard box of desk impedimenta under her arm, and that was currency enough to look Abigail Santini in the eye.

  ‘Gaby!’

  Faraway was standing up at his work station. He smiled the famous Faraway smile and drummed his hands on the desk top. Tembo stood up and joined the rhythm. And the whole office rose and thundered hands on desks, banged chairs, rattled files, disc boxes, thumped books. In his glass cubicle, T.P. Costello raised a triumphant fist.

  They hung out the windows and whistled and cheered as she walked down Tom M’boya Street to the car park.

  Gaby gave an interview an hour at the Elephant Bar. It was a political choice of venue. The Thorn Tree was the journalists’ bar. The interviewers were all media people who had never noticed her before Unit 12, but were now her best friends and greatest admirers and most fervent supporters.

  Between the interviews, she called Shepard. Each time she got his answering machine. When she was satisfied that he had gone back to the US to bury his son and ex-wife, she drove over to get the rest of her things. There were not many. She packed them quietly. She was glad to be out of the house. It felt as if the dying had taken wings and crossed the ocean and come to roost there. The Siberians threw her a party in the Elephant Bar that night. Many SkyNetters came, though T.P.’s official farewell lunch was scheduled for the next day at the Norfolk Hotel. The dress code had been relaxed this once, but most guests enthusiastically observed the see-knees rule. The Siberian pilots performed ‘There is Nothing Like a Dame’ from South Pacific in Gaby’s honour, complete with the acrobatic dancing Marines. Then they carried Gaby on their shoulders around the bar and across the airfield singing ‘Bloody Gaby is the Gal We Love’.

  ‘I knew I would lose him,’ Gaby said to Oksana, after the singers had gone back into the bar to drink much more and left them out on the strip with the aeroplanes. ‘I can’t allow myself to keep things. I was the kid who had to take all her Christmas presents apart on Boxing Day because I’d got bored with them doing just what they were meant to do and then couldn’t put them back together again.’

  ‘You are a bird who flies in straight lines,’ Oksana said. ‘You pick your destination, you spot your landmarks, you fly straight toward them. Me, I go in circles, because that is how the world goes. Things come close, things move apart again. This way nothing is ever lost. You will come back to this country. No one who comes here ever leaves it, in here.’ She touched the place where her breast had been tattooed with the totemic mask of the wolf. ‘And you will find Shepard again, because you have never really left him, in here.’

  Aircraft lights moved in the big dark over the city. Gaby thought about the time on the coast, with the kids. The circles had been closest them, and therefore all they could do after that was move apart. But some journeys end, she thought.

  She saw Fraser taking the ball off her in a sliding tackle and turning to blast it over the goal line. She tried to imagine his journey ended. She tried to imagine him dead. Something tore within. She saw Aaro
n coming out of the sea in his mask and snorkel, flapping over the sand in his yellow flippers. He would be in a wheelchair forever. If he lived. The thing inside tore a little more. When it tore all the way, all the things that had fallen apart inside would spill out and she would be a long, long time picking them up and trying to put them back in their places. If she was careful, it would hold until she was out of this place, away from these people she did not want to shame with the nakedness of her despair.

  At T.P.’s valedictory lunch Gaby discovered more prominent friends and ardent admirers of the type who wait until the afternoon your plane leaves to tell you so. Regret was expressed about her hair, a beacon in the news community.

  ‘It’s growing right back,’ Gaby said. But she saw how Abigail Santini smiled at her.

  Dr Dan had been invited but sent his regrets that he would not be able to attend through his lawyer Johnson Ambani. He had been subpoenaed to appear before a Ministerial Committee to answer accusations that he had exceeded the remit of his enquiry.