Chaga

by Ian McDonald

  ‘Where did it learn to build a thing like that?’ Gaby said.

  ‘From us. Where do you think?’ T.P. restarted the car. Gaby looked long at the isolated plantations of alien Chaga growing out of the human landscape. Biological packages. Winged seeds, like the paired helicopters of the sycamore, sent spinning in their hundreds by the equinoctial gales. Beautiful weeds, her father had called sycamores. They pushed everything else out; took the place over.

  And that greatest winged seed of all, the Big Dumb Object, was only three months from Earth.

  ‘I’ll drop you at Faraway’s,’ T.P. said dodging the military traffic as he headed for the golden towers of Nairobi. ‘If you can make it, we’ll be at the Thorn Tree. There are folk there looking forward to seeing you again. Otherwise, UN Press centre, tomorrow at eight-thirty. Jesus, it’s good to have you back, Gaby. What is it?’

  She did not answer. She was getting used to the weight and feeling of a gun in her hand.

  56

  Tembo greeted Gaby with unrestrained Christian joy and showed her videoprints of his new daughter, aged ten months. Her name meant After-the-Rains. Gaby said it was one of the most beautiful names she had ever heard for a child, but she had been born under the bitter star of the dispossessed. She had already lost one home, and the temporary prefab she had been rehoused in was five days from terminum. You could see the land corals and fan trees from the front door; two streets away. When they got to one street away, Tembo and his family would leave. He did not know where for. He hoped it would be Zanzibar. That was why he had come to the UN Press Conference in the Kenyatta Centre Conference Hall; because today General Sir Patrick Lilley, Supreme Commander East Africa Land Forces, passed out the exit visas to Kenyan nationals.

  T.P. Costello had reserved a block of seats half-way down the centre aisle.

  ‘Missed you at the Thorn Tree last night,’ he said to Gaby.

  ‘Better things to do,’ she said, unable to hide the grin.

  ‘Tell me you’re not banging Faraway.’

  ‘I’m banging Faraway. And for your information, he bangs exceedingly loud, and long.’

  ‘Slut.’

  She did not tell him about the sensory deprivation thing with the blindfold and the white noise, because he would have misunderstood. It was partly for the totality of skin on skin. The rest of it was to shut out the constantly hovering helicopters and the bursts of gunfire from the streets and the distant thud of the artillery up in the northern bourgeois districts, futilely shelling the edge of the Chaga. To shut it out and forget that Shepard was out there on those streets she did not know any more. To pretend, in the silence and the blindness, that this body under her was any body, this skin any skin, any colour she wished.

  The conference hall fell silent. A tall, sandy-haired white man in desert camouflage fatigues had taken the place behind the lectern. He studied his notes, pushed his glasses up his nose and surveyed the rows of news people. Gaby thought of wire-haired fox terriers. General Sir Patrick Lilley. Sandhurst Class of ’85. Active service in Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Iraq, Peru, Pakistan. Do you think the world has forgotten that off-the-record, on-the-camera comment about leaving the bloody wogs to sort it out for themselves? Not the people in those burned-out villages and bombed-out towns, who you refused to protect because it might mean your little boy soldiers being shot at. Not the people in this hall, this country. We are all wogs; and we sort it out for ourselves. When I go onto those streets, it will not with your blue-helmeted nannies. It will be with people I and the street respect. It will be with the Black Simbas.

  ‘Good morning, ladies and gentlemen,’ General Sir Patrick Lilley said. ‘Nice to see so many familiar faces. Before we get on to the allocations, the usual update.’ He talks like the Last Englishman, Gaby thought. ‘Terminum of the Nyandarua symb is officially fixed today as a line of latitude Map Reference one degree twelve minutes twenty-three seconds south. Program your GPS locators accordingly. The usual caveats about wandering onto the wrong side apply.

  ‘Users of the Nairobi localnet of the East African teleport have been experiencing transmission breaks and data errors. We have discovered that this had been caused by the intrusion of symb organic circuitry into the optical fibre network. The Nyandarua symb seems to be integrating itself with the East African teleport. We are unable to predict the long-term consequences of this; should it pose a threat to security, we will have to seek government approval to isolate the Nairobi localnet. For the meantime, I’m afraid we’ll all just have to tolerate the interruptions and drop-outs.’

  Gaby wondered his beret did not slide off his head at such an angle. Hat pins, that’s your secret, isn’t it, Sir Paddy?

  ‘Now, to the chief business of this press conference. I will be calling the agencies that have filed for exit visas in alphabetical order. Would those called please have their documents certified by my aide.’ Who was a fox terrier bitch. Gaby studied the faces of those who waited to hear their names called by General Sir Paddy. All were black. Most had the look of terrified resignation to the inevitable Gaby had once seen on a wildebeest pulled down by the nose and disembowelled by a pack of hyenas.

  General Sir Paddy called SkyNet down, section by section. Gaby watched T.P. collect his way out of Kenya. She heard a name she did not recognize and was most surprised to see Faraway go cantering down the steps. Then she heard her own name and went down to pick up the papers and the plastic badge with her photograph on it from the fox terrier bitch. General Sir Paddy was into Transworld Television by the time Gaby had regained her seat. It was only there, seeing the hands clutching their visas and identity badges, that she realized.

  ‘Where’s Tembo’s? What about Tembo?’ Nobody could look at her. She yelled down at the podium. ‘What the fuck about Tembo?’ General Sir Paddy paused in his reading of the names to frown at this loud, ill-mannered, rebellious Irishwoman.

  ‘T.P., you have to do something. He’s got a wife and kids, for God’s sake. He’s like family, like my favourite uncle. You owe him, T.P.’

  ‘There’s nothing I can do, Gaby. My hands are tied on this one. Believe me, this guts me as much as it does you.’

  ‘I’ve heard that before, T.P.’ She made to go down to confront General Sir Lilley on his podium. T.P. Costello grasped her and spun her around with unguessed strength.

  ‘Get on Sir Paddy’s tits, and you fuck it up for all of us. We walk a very fine line here.’

  ‘Four and a half years, and you’re still feeding me the same brown-nose shit,’ Gaby said. ‘When are you ever going to realize that we don’t need these people? Faraway, Tembo, I need you. And your family, Tembo. And the keys to the Landcruiser, T.P.’

  ‘Where are you taking them?’

  ‘To get on the tits of whatever agency decides these things, until they give me the result I want.’

  57

  The UNHCR sent her to the OAU offices. The OAU sent her to the UNHCR but she told them they had sent her here so they suggested she try the IRC. The IRC said it could not do this thing and sent her to the EU Embassy. The EU Embassy looked at her as if she were dog shit on the mat and told her to go to the Kenyan Ministry of Foreign Affairs Office on Harambee Avenue. This was a purely internal affair, Harambee Avenue decided and sent her to the Home Affairs and National Heritage Office on Moi Avenue, where seven hundred Rastafarian pilgrims in red, gold and green, who had come to join the great exodus to the Holy Mount Zion in Africa, were camped with their children and the goats they purchased from refugees glad to part with them for hard currency. Harassed UNHCR staff in white and blue bulletproof vests were trying to move them on to the buses that would take them up the Westlands Gate to be processed through. The hard currency goats cropped the sparse grass central reservations and nibbled the tips of the smog-blighted yuccas.

  As this process was going to take some time and little After-the-Rains had started to cry and Gaby’s temper was fraying, Tembo suggested a short-cut through service alleys that would t
ake them out at the other end of Moi Avenue. There were dead bodies in the alleys behind Nairobi’s golden towers. They were swollen and waxy with gas and rot. Gaby could not avoid driving over some. She made herself listen to After-the-Rains and not the crack and pop of bursting flesh.

  It was as bad as the Rastafarians outside the Home Affairs Office. Five hundred people were trying to push through the revolving doors. Policemen shaded themselves under the thorn trees, unable to take effective action. On Faraway’s suggestion, Gaby turned out microphone, camera and camera crew.

  ‘Could you help us get in there?’

  The policemen eagerly gave up their lounging and cleared a path to the door. They managed to do it smiling to the camera. This was a pity; the camera was not running.

  They fought their way to a counter clerk who sent them to a superior who referred them to an executive officer on the fifth floor in an office with a desk, a chair, a PDU and eighty cardboard document boxes who said that all press accreditation was being handled by the UN and sent them to East Africa Command Headquarters on Chiromo Road.

  There was not a shop left open on all of Haile Selassie Avenue. Those that had not been looted and burned-out were shuttered. In the expensive shops, that sold watches and jewellery and other negotiables, the steel security curtains had been smashed in by ram raiders. The front end of a Suzuki 4×4 projected from the front of Sharma and Sons, Discount Jewellers. Traders had set up pitches on the sidewalks: a trestle table spread with CDs and discplayers; a plastic fertilizer sack split and opened on the ground on which bottles of Volvic mineral water were piled in little ziggurats. A man with a rifle at his side sold car batteries from the porch of the Christian Publishing Office. In the back row of seats the children were crying. Mrs Tembo held them in her arms.

  ‘Hush now, babies,’ she said. ‘Don’t cry, don’t cry.’

  Gaby’s identity card and DF108 were inspected at five different checkpoints on the approach to East Africa Military Command. The soldiers turned out all the passengers to take up the seats to make sure they were not carrying explosives before they would open the barrier to the visitors car park. Gaby left Faraway as a deterrent to thieves and marched Tembo, Mrs Tembo, Sarah, Etambele and After-the-Rains into the reception area and demanded to see someone with the authority to issue an exit visa to Sky Net’s most valuable news gatherer and his family. After forty minutes, an adjutant was sufficiently under-busy to come and tell the civilians that they were in the wrong section of East Africa Military Command. This was East Africa Military Strategic Command. They needed East Africa Military Logistics Command, which had taken over the Church Army Training Centre on Jogoo Road.

  Landhries Road had been sealed off with a barricade of wrecked cars where a doodlebug had come down on the Country Bus Station. Detour signs hand-painted on the rusted doors directed traffic along Pumwani Road. The slums had grown bigger in four and a half years; down to and over the Nairobi River. Slums never grow any smaller. They are bad when they are lived in, but worse in decay. Many of the shanties had collapsed or slumped into the river, which was a swamp of plastic, scrap metal, wood and dead things.

  There was a road block up at the top of Kericho Road. Two Nissan pick-ups with anti-aircraft guns bolted into the truck bodies—picknis, as they were known on the streets—were parked nose to nose, restricting the traffic to a single line past men carrying automatic weapons. Incongruously, they were dressed in red and purple Chaga-combats under football managers’ coats. The cartel banners drooping from the pickni’s whip aerials sported the black-and-white fuller sphere of a football on a green field. Football, buckyball, Gaby thought. She knew them: the Soca Boys, one of the smaller Tactical cartels that had remained fiercely non-aligned while the others forged alliances and brokered power blocs. A show of strength; a message to the Premier Division managers that the Soca Boys could be valuable players to have on-side when the final play-offs came.

  The Tacticals waved through a pick-up hidden under a pile of firewood. Gaby fished out a couple of Krugerrands. The Land-cruiser crawled closer. A smoke-belching municipal bus went through the checkpoint. Gaby had not thought they were still running.

  ‘Hide your guns,’ Gaby hissed. ‘You in the back, look scared.’

  ‘That is not difficult,’ Mrs Tembo said.

  A Soca Boy in a Grampus 11 coat came to the open window.

  ‘Hello, m’zungu,’ he said. ‘That is a mighty colourful car you are driving. Would you like to put my face on television, news lady?’

  The helicopter came in from nowhere across the shanties, hard and fast: a big Hokum gunship with UN painted on the side. At the sight of it, the Soca Boys ran for their vehicles. The helicopter turned in the air. The picknis drove off at speed. The helicopter tried to follow them through the warren of cinder-block project housing. Minutes later, Gaby passed a convoy of UN armoured vehicles coming at speed up Leman Road. In two days they would be gone from this city, but for those two days they still ruled the street and they admitted no challengers.

  ‘Isn’t that where you led the choir?’ Gaby asked as they passed a big red brick church with a red tin roof.

  ‘St Stephen’s, yes,’ Tembo said. ‘But no one is singing there any more.’

  The United Nations East Africa Military Logistics Command Headquarters, formerly the Church Army training centre, was directly opposite St Stephen’s Church. Once again, identifications and authorizations were inspected, and Gaby marched the family into the reception area and refused to move them until she saw whoever was in charge of exit visas. She only had to wait thirty-five minutes this time for an aide to talk to her, Tembo and Faraway. They waited another thirty-five while the aide referred the application to his superior, and another thirty-five while the superior checked with the people down in reception and decided if he could talk to these civilians. Tembo’s wife and children sat on plastic chairs under the window of the temporary building that was the reception area and ate vending machine sandwiches and chocolate. Faraway looked out the window, drinking coffee. He is one of those men, Gaby thought, who unconsciously relax into postures that look good to women.

  The superior said that he could not vet an application for an emergency visa on Gaby’s authority alone. Faraway negotiated in his capacity as Deputy Station Manager. The officer was still not convinced. Faraway called T.P. on his cellphone and gave it to the officer. Gaby looked out of the window at the soldiers sitting by the side of Jogoo Road. She saw a man in Islamic dress come up the road pushing something that looked like a dog kennel on wheels. Gaby remembered this man, this machine. There would be a veiled woman hidden inside, with only her eyes catching the light. Some of the soldiers offered the man money. He refused to accept any of it. Gaby watched him pass up the road. He is part of the Kenya that was, she thought, that I loved but cannot find any more, for it has turned alien and ugly, like a rotting slum, or a woman hidden in a wooden hutch.

  Faraway had his PDU on the desk. Hardcopy documents were squeezing forth. The officer took them across the compound, past the chapel to the accommodation block where the work was done. Tembo looked from Faraway to his wife to his children. Some of the military who came and went through the reception area squatted down to talk to Tembo’s beautiful daughters.

  The robed man with the wooden hutch on wheels was coming down Jogoo Road again. Gaby watched him pass again the soldiers sunning themselves. They did not offer him any money this time.

  The officer was coming back across the compound now. He looked out of breath. His white face was red. He seated himself behind the counter and put two forms in front of Faraway for him to sign.

  Gaby saw all the things that happened next as separate, discrete edits of experience.

  She saw the beggar man in Arab dress come running up the road as fast he could. He did not have the trolley with him.

  She saw the soldiers at the side of the road get to their feet as he ran past.

  She saw Faraway turn from the reception desk with his b
iggest smile and a piece of paper in either hand.

  She saw the white light, and the fireball inside the white light.

  She heard the explosion. She heard it like it had blown into every cell of her body and shaken its death-noise out of them.

  She saw the window of the reception cabin fly inward in a million stinging insects of glass. She saw Tembo throw wife and children down as the glass passed over their heads. She saw Faraway dive for the floor, tuck himself into a ball, arms wrapped over head. She saw the reception staff take cover behind their desks and counter as the glass rained down on them.

  She seemed to be the only one standing, like the domed building in Hiroshima that was directly under Fat Boy.

  Gaby could take in every detail in a flicker of an eyelid. The man in Arab dress was lying face down in the middle of Jogoo Road. The bomb had gone off a hundred yards further down. There was nothing left of the wooden trolley that had carried it. Three trucks were burning; one of the refugee buses was overturned. The bodies of the soldiers were scattered like chaff. Over everything hung a huge silence and slowness. Then the sound rushed into the still place after the bomb and there were screaming men and burning vehicles and yelling people.

  ‘Come on!’ Gaby shouted to her team. ‘We’ve got work to do.’

  Faraway jammed the emergency visa into Mrs Tembo’s hands and ran after Gaby.

  It was like she was a neutrino. She moved through the destroyed vehicles and the knots of shocked people without interacting with them, without being deflected by their confusion and suffering from her purpose. Soldiers pulled comrades from the tangled wrecks of vehicles; dragged shattered bodies away from pools of burning fuel. Gaby passed by. Scraps of meat and seared cloth were scraped into a gutter. Gaby sent the eye of the lens over them and moved on. Troopers comforted their screaming friends. A man sitting beside a soldier with no face shouted and shouted and shouted for a doctor to help his buddy. Combat medics triaged victims. Sirens wailed in the distance: ambulances, fire engines, fast approaching. In the middle of all, Gaby sent her camera eye probing. No one noticed her. The fire engines foamed down the burning vehicles. Ambulances, civilian and military, moved between the army trucks and disgorged trauma teams. Still no one saw Gaby and Faraway and Tembo. It was only when the military police came to seal the area that people saw there was a news team among them, filming the worst moment of their lives. Two white-helmets rounded Gaby and Faraway and Tembo up and pushed them beyond the edge of the cordon.