Chaga

by Ian McDonald

  Henry Ford, cream yourself: will the Industrial Forest usurp the Plastic Forest in the media-fed mind of the Man on the Clapham Omnibus? If T.P.’s sources are anything to go by (and have they ever been anything other than reliable?) the executive singles of the Hiltons Sheratons Intercontinentals Ramadas and PanAfrics are hot-bunking Silicon Valley cyberneticists, brisk Teutonic micro-engineers, tofu-and-bran custom logic designers and giggling Sony-Nihon chip customisers; all engaged in internecine warfare to be the first to bring home the glittering prize to their particular genus of Homo polycorporatus. Sorry, boys, but the Good News from the Chaga is co-operation beats competition hands down, and is advancing towards your expense-account suites at one hundred metres per day.

  I saw a vervet monkey today; nervous eyes in the shimmering canopy. A webbed sail of ribs, like some remnant of the time of the dinosaurs, grew from its back. I did not take it for a good omen.

  I shall spend the night in the ruins of an old game lodge I came across unexpectedly; a memory of the days of zebra-striped Volkswagen minibuses bristling broadsides of Nikons. One thing the Chaga has done is restore peace and dignity to the land. These foothills of Kilimanjaro feel old in a way the land in Europe never can; it deserves the respect due age. I slung up my hammock on the veranda of the old game lodge. I had meant to write, cook, wash, do something; but a melancholy lassitude came over me. A calling of spirit to spirit almost, as I lost myself in the shafts of green light. The fragile moment of self-unknowing when the consciousness is totally subsumed into the other, when the slightest tremor of self-awareness taps the still waters and the reflection shivers into ripples. Time out of mind. I heard him. I heard him, his voice, out there, a voice in solo flight above the chords of the forest song. I hear you, Langrishe. I am coming.

  Towards nightfall the small glade in which the abandoned lodge stood came alive and ringing with songs. Twittering, rippling, passing into and out of phase with each other. As the first of them came out of the gathering dark, I rose to my feet; just the few at first, then the main body, a procession of creatures like faintly luminous jellyfish rolling and undulating through the air. They separated around the lodge like a river around a rock; they were still coming to break around me as I retired to my hammock, out of darkness, onward into the darkness again.

  I’ll tell you the exact place and time I fell in love with Peter Langrishe: 17 March, 10.20 p.m., beside the drinks trolley in the garden of the Irish Ambassador’s Residence. I could even tell you what we were drinking—me: John Jameson’s, neat, just a clink of ice; he: a Glenlivet that had somehow found a niche on His Excellency’s strictly patriotic booze wagon.

  The annual ambassadorial St Patrick’s Day party is the highlight of the expatriate community year. Southerner or Northerner, everyone is an Irishman on St Patrick’s Night. Voluntary workers, development engineers, teaching sisters, rural midwives, Bible translators will move heaven and earth to be there for His Excellency’s bash. Head of any guest list was T.P. Costello: it was widely known and never officially denied that if His Excellency really wanted to know what was happening in the greater world he would do much better visiting 224b Tom M’boya Street than grinding himself exceeding fine in the tedious mills of diplomatic intelligence.

  An expatriate and colleague of T.P., my gilt-edged invitation was assured; knowing my tendency to drink myself horizontal—something I did not much want to do in the presence of teaching sisters rural midwives Bible translators ambassadors, etc.—I had thought of declining until T.P. whispered that it might well be in my best professional interests to attend. I bought a dress for the occasion, the best my means and Nairobi’s supply could achieve.

  Two weeks of daily exposure to T.P.’s driving still hadn’t immunised me to taking roundabouts at forty: dodging red Kenatco taxis, he explained to me that he had come into certain information to the effect that certain highly placed individuals connected with a certain international research community could be in attendance at a certain ambassadorial bash ce soir.

  ‘I didn’t know there were any Irish on the project.’

  ‘Oh, there aren’t,’ said T.P., terrorising a flock of pedestrians with his horn. ‘But it’s good social and better political grace to be seen to be hospitable to the scientific community. Honorary Irishmen for one night.’

  Ghosts and illuminations: the assemblage of rented tuxes and almost-posh frocks was lit by outdoor candles on poles and lubricated by the ever-solicitous presence of the servants, all white smiles and freshly ironed cuffs. From the cover of a glass of J.J., T.P. steered me through the clashing rocks to the more noteworthy landmarks. An ectomorphic Norman Bates in animated conversation with a nun. ‘Nikolas van Rensberg, Project Supervisor of the Ol Tukai Facility: Grand Pooh-Bah, between thee and me, he’s a bit of a wanker.’ Laurel and Hardy arguing by candlelight, a raven-haired woman in a dress that earned her my undying enmity trying, and failing, to keep the peace. ‘Conrad Laurens from Ol Tukai, the Bouncing Belgian, and Hakko Lemmenjavi, the Frigging Finn, from Nyandarua. Lord High Executioner and Lord High Everything Else. No love lost between the two facilities. The fine, and exceedingly foolish, young creature between them is Annabelle Pasquali, Senior Botanical Supervisor from Ol Tukai. I once had a short, sweet and altogether wonderful affair with her.’

  I wanted to know more about the short, sweet and altogether wonderful affair, but T.P. had moved on to a small and typically astringent American woman in Nina Ricci frock and red Reeboks (‘Honestly, these Colonials; bad taste is a national virtue’), holding court with a diplomatically bored ambassador surreptitiously searching his pockets for cigarettes. ‘Dorothy Bazyn. Project Security. The military exclusion zones around the Chagas were her idea. I once tried, God knows why, to chat her up at a cocktail party in the Hilton and was asked how I’d like a cocktail stick rammed up my dick.’ A solitary man by the drinks trolley with a pigtail and a face like a Yeats poem. ‘Ah. Now. This one might be worth your while. In fact, of all the luminaries here foregathered, I would definitely say he would pay the best dividend. Peter Langrishe, Head of Xenobiotics, whatever that is, and a fellow Celt, though of the genus Pictii rather than the genus Hibernii. If you want a dash of Vindaloo in your book, he’s the boy to talk to. More wild and woolly theories about the Chaga than you can shake a stick at. Aliens are his pet obsession.’

  ‘Introduce me this instant, Costello.’

  T.P.’s smile froze on his face.

  ‘Oh, shit. Jacobellini has just waltzed in with two lumps of silicon implant on either arm. I thought he was well out of it down in Dar. Any excuse for a piss-up. I suppose I’d better go and pay me devoirs. Behave yourself. What’ll you do?’

  ‘Behave myself.’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  Disgusting how like South Pacific it was, some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger, all that…just at that moment our eyes did meet, and hold. I attempted to match my orbit with his, weaving and apologising through the teaching sisters rural midwives Bible translators.

  Overheards: ‘I tried to get him to talk about the blood, but he wouldn’t!’ (Then, more vehemently) ‘He wouldn’t!’

  ‘Are you sure you remembered the chain saw?’

  ‘I mean, can you imagine, going out with the same girl for ten days?’

  ‘And then he told me about the psychopath…’

  ‘Yes, but exactly what kind of a prick was Proust?’

  ‘You know, some mornings I get up and I just feel so… Antipodean, you know?’

  We arrived in each other’s gravitational field, mutually circling verbal satellites.

  ‘Nice dress.’

  I wriggled, consciously counting every centimetre of bare flesh.

  ‘Nice…ah, pigtail.’

  He told me his name, I told him mine; little hostages, exchanged.

  ‘It isn’t you at all,’ he said.

  ‘What, my name? An unfortunate inevitability of being born in a Catholic country.’

  ‘No, you de
serve better. You should be something more…elemental. A come-by-night. A Moon.’

  Sometimes you can feel your pupils dilate. Sometimes you possess the awareness of the exact state of every muscle in your body. Sometimes the fingers of unseen guests caress your spine.

  ‘Moon. I like it. Moon I shall be, for the evening at least. And do you have an elemental name for yourself?’

  I never got to hear.

  There was a sudden collective gasp and sigh from the gathered celebrants. A long slow streak of violet light drew a strict terminator across the sky above Nairobi before vanishing beyond the western horizon. Twenty-five personal pagers exploded in frenzied beeping; needlessly, the representatives of the Facility were already stampeding the cloakroom and calling taxis on their cellphones to take them to Wilson airfield.

  Not even an apology.

  I had to drive T.P. home. He interrupted a major monologue about the dangers of dehydration and the virtues of ascorbic acid in ameliorating the effects of extreme inebriation to throw up his entire night’s consumption of John Jameson down the front of my party dress.

  His arrival in the office on Tom M’boya Street at twenty to one was wary in the extreme. It took the offer of a late Indian lunch at the Norfolk Hotel to placate me. Over rogan josh he told me that the satellite tracking station at Longonot had picked up the biological package coming in from orbit over the Solomon Islands. It had impacted somewhere in West Cameroon and was currently under investigation by an advance team of international researchers.

  He tried to make me pay half the bill.

  The primal heart of the New Africa is shaped like a twin deck CD twenty watt per channel boombox. It beats in 4/4 time from Sony woofers and JVC bass drivers to the pulse of hy-life guitars pickin’ three-chord tricks. I have seen Rendille herdsmen, perched in the one-legged attitude of biblical repose, wearing Walkman headphones, I have seen Nandi Hills coffee growers in the fields with ghetto-blasters strapped across their backs. The first thing you hear when you arrive in Kenya is the Immigration Officer’s radio; from that moment on the general dance never ceases. The gaudy, hazy chaos of the country bus station. The voices and colours and perfume of the fruit market. The Asian store where seriously fat women fuss over kangas. Sam’s Super Shine Stall on Kenyatta Avenue. Along Koinange Street, from every street vendor selling maize and kebabs grilled over Volkswagen hubcaps full of charcoal.

  So familiar that I almost didn’t realise the utter incongruity of what I was hearing. Sunny-Odé and his African Beats; thirty kilometres into the Chaga, on the lower slopes of Kilimanjaro.

  The WaChagga may be the last proud people in the New Africa. The invasion of alien flora and fauna had dispossessed them of their ancestral lands on the slopes of the mountain, it had even taken their name; all it had left them was their stubbornness. Not the most obviously useful asset against the advancing wave of life, but where fire, chainsaw, Agent Orange, Agent Green and finally recombinant DNA had failed to stem the green tide, sheer stubbornness, and infinite adaptability, had won a small but not insignificant victory. In the general panic to evacuate when it became obvious that Moshi, Himo and a clutter of smaller settlements along the Tanzanian side of the mountain were going to be engulfed, a few recalcitrant WaChagga had slipped under the wire around the resettlement camps and vanished from the twentieth century.

  I know how Dr Livingstone must have felt.

  The men of the settlement turned out to meet me, from honoured grandfathers to a five-year-old swinging the boombox I had heard over the general voice of the forest.

  (They insisted I call it that: the forest; they were the Chagga and they resented it having buccaneered their name.)

  Not so much Dr Livingstone, I presume, as Dorothy in Munchkinland. There was even a Yellow Brick Road to follow, hexagonal tiles of hard yellow plastic that concluded in a comically accurate spiral at the centre of the village.

  We call tree-dwellers arboreals, but what do we call flower-dwellers? Floreals? Sounds too much like a dead bullfighter, but the word fits; the WaChagga lived, literally, in flowers. An impeccably mannered young graduate from the University of Dar es Salaam was assigned as my guide to the wonders of the community his people had created in the forest. Seen by daylight the flower-houses were wide parasols of zip-locked iridescent petals atop a central trunk; in their shade naked children scampered and monolithic women sat, moving only their eyes to look at the m’zungu woman. Passing them again by twilight I saw the petals folding down into night-proof bubbles of light and warmth. I was taken to join a circle of women sitting weaving what looked like nylon thread on belt looms while watching a ten-year-old American super-soap (courtesy Voice or Kenya Broadcasting) on a portable Sony colour set (Somewhat scabbed and ulcerous, but nonetheless functional) plugged into the trunk of the tree.

  ‘The petals generate electricity from sunlight,’ explained my guide. Freshly graduated and already disillusioned with the academic life, he had brought himself and his European Studies degree home to the shadow of the White Mountain, and then the biological package came down. ‘The trunk stores power during the day for us at night.’ Balloon-sized globes clustered near the top of the trunk were bioluminescent: ‘They somehow know to come on when it gets dark. Look!’ He turned a spigot-like extrusion from the trunk; water splashed. ‘We have hot as well; solar heating. Come!’ The friendly imperiousness of the Africans. He guided me around the municipal plumbing system: the huge transparent gourds that were the main cisterns, the obscenely peristaltic organic pumps that maintained pressure, the stacked fans of solar absorbers that heated the water, the distribution system of plastic tubes and pipes to every house. The inspection detoured via the municipal biogas plant to conclude among the orchards that had sprung up around the settlement and which now provided their entire diet.

  I was the only woman guest at the dinner in my honour that night; seated around the central spiral with the menfolk, while the women served up the fruits of the Chaga. As an honorary man, I had debated whether I should follow local fashion and undress for dinner. Casting modesty to the devil, I turned up in old cycling shorts and silver.

  As we ate, Chief Webuye spoke to me through his interpreter. ‘We did not come to it. It came to us. It was not easy in those early days, before the orchards grew, we could not eat the food, many of us grew sick and died, but the land was ours and the land still knew us, and came to our need. From the bodies of the dead grew the trees that keep us, from their water came our water, from their bones came our bread, from their skins the houses that shelter us. The forest, having taken from us, is bound to give back the homes it took.’

  Traveller’s wisdom from Chief Webuye: where you see the colour orange, you will always find water. Anything red will always be edible. Always shit before you sleep, and bury it, you will have food in the morning. A drop of blood on the ground and you will have fruit.

  Behind me, the jack o’ lantern glow of flower-houses closed up for the night, and the comforting jangle of guitars. Africans will always have their music. Not for the WaChagga the adolescent obsession with identity that mars modern African thought, they had found their identity in the heart of the alienness. Eating with them, communing with them, I felt I was no longer a stranger in the forest.

  Asleep that night in a pile of spun floss, I thought I heard my name called, very softly, very gently…Moon. One, two, three times.

  ‘Langrishe?’ I unzipped the folded solar petals. My astral namesake was high and full and casting a silver unreality over the sleeping village. ‘Langrishe…’

  —Moon—

  The Chaga was impenetrable as death. Haunted, frustrated, I retired to the house. My sleep was ridden by incubus dreams. When next I woke it was to the house petals unfurling to the sun.

  Even before I heard the keening, wailing song of the women, I could feel the air stiff with fear and secrecy. They had gathered in a petal-house across the spiral, the women, slumped like black lava, rocking and nodding and moaning their
song. One at a time they would rise and go forward to comfort the desolate young woman at the centre of the ring. Totally absorbed with their mourning, they were oblivious to my approach; it was Tibuweye, the guide, who stopped me.

  ‘Please. It is not for you. Constance, the young woman, she gave birth last night, but the child was stillborn. Please understand.’

  ‘I understand. I am sorry. Please tell her that I am sorry.’

  I glanced at the circle of women, at the mother racked with the silent tears of complete grief, and, as the women swayed and rocked in their keening, at the baby at her feet. One of the women saw my staring and whipped a sheet over the body.

  The child had no arms, no legs; in their place coiling green tendrils sprouted.

  Before I left, they gave me two gifts. I am not certain which I treasure the more, the little glass jars that light up when I shake them, or the path that follows the rumour of a man, a mad half-legend half glimpsed by the foresters in the recesses of the forest, upward. All this morning I have climbed through the gardens of the WaChagga, the slopes ringing with the proud, animal cries of the men harvesting. I pause to eat some fruit from a tree; red fruit, it tastes of musk and sex, it tastes of the Chaga.

  Did the apple in Eden feel responsible?

  It must be one of those laws of universal perversity, the kind of thing you see in sticker form in the rear windows of Fords, that when the thing you want most in the world happens, you don’t believe it. When the phone rang and there among the hissing and scratching was Dr Peter Langrishe of the Ol Tukai Xenobiotics Department extending a personal invitation to me to fly down to Amboseli and spend a week at the centre all I was capable of were a few mumbled acquiescences and a numb replacing of the receiver. T.P. said I looked like a victim of a good confidence trick. Four hours later I was standing on the apron at Wilson airfield, bags packed (‘nothing plastic, my dear, and that includes Walkman, film and toothbrush’) and fighting to maintain connection with my hat in the propwash from the Ol Tukai Twin Otter.