Fatboy and the Dancing Ladies

by Michael Holman

  “Power!” she would say to him as they sat round the lunchtime fire. “It affects the memory. People with power forget old friends. They lose their manners. They are rude to ordinary folk.

  “But strangest of all, when they get power, they grow bigger; when they lose power, they go smaller.”

  She would pull her old blanket around her narrow shoulders, clear her throat and expectorate, punctuating her words of wisdom with a gob of phlegm, directing it at an unfortunate lizard, and laughing if it found its mark.

  The eyes of a lizard, Mlambo had noticed, and the eyes of his gran, had much in common. Both had a rheumy film over them, and both seemed to have 360-degree vision. She had laughed and laughed when a much younger Mlambo had asked whether she and the lizards were related – but she had not denied it.

  “Listen to me, young man. What I tell you about power is true. True! I have seen it myself. When my sister’s daughter got a place in school, the girl thought she was very clever. And sure enough, she looked bigger. When she had to marry the boy who made her pregnant and left school, sure enough, she looked smaller. Even though she was with child.

  “You, Mlambo, are big now, because you are the boy in charge of goats. This makes you bigger. But if you lose a goat, you will lose your job, and then you will get smaller. So be careful, young Mlambo. Look after your goats!”

  Could it be that his gran’s warning about the loss of power was already coming true? Could it be that he, Ferdinand Mlambo, was becoming smaller? Perhaps he had Aids. The thought that he might be yet another victim of the ghastly plague made him feel sick in his stomach.

  But it also encouraged him, and helped him as he drew up the plan for revenge – the plan that had begun when he pricked his thumb on the sharp end of one of the knitting needles.

  As he later explained to Ntoto and Rutere: “It grew in my head, like a paw-paw grows from a pip.”

  But first, he would seek the boys’ help. As he approached Harrods, he felt himself getting smaller, his shoulders sagging, his arms hanging limply at his side, and his feet dragging.

  By the time he arrived at Harrods he had convinced himself that his gran’s warning was literally true.

  16

  The city’s main post office had yet to open. It was too early to collect the letter from the governor of the Central Bank that Charity had asked them to bring back, and the avocados would be picked up on the way back to Harrods, so Titus Ntoto and Cyrus Rutere squatted on the kerb, content to watch the traffic go by.

  It had been fifteen days since they had cheered on Bright Khumalo from the airport’s perimeter fence, waving as their friend climbed into the undercarriage of the London-bound flight, just as the plane had turned and paused before rumbling down the runway.

  “Perhaps Bright has lost the postcard,” said Rutere, “and he cannot send a new one, because he does not want people to know that he is irriterate . . .”

  Ntoto merely grunted.

  Taking an occasional sniff from their glue bottles, they slouched in the shade cast by an advertising board on Uhuru Avenue, the city’s main thoroughfare, and ever-watchful for policemen, security guards and other enemies, waited for the post office to open. Rutere took the opportunity to quiz his friend.

  “So, Ntoto,” said Rutere.

  Titus Ntoto sat, heavy-lidded eyes keeping watch for prowling askaris for whom thrashing street boys was a welcome break from their boring routine.

  Rutere ran his finger round the rim of his nose, an unconscious gesture that helped him concentrate.

  “Have we decided – we are not going to be bang-bang boys?”

  Ntoto shook his head. He had told Cyrus that if ever he became a bang-bang boy, Rutere would be his choice of partner. But he had no intention of taking a dead-end job. The life of a bang-bang boy was not for him.

  “A geography boy?” asked Rutere.

  It could be lucrative; and it could see you through your life, because age was no barrier to a geography boy. But you had to keep learning.

  “I will think,” said Ntoto, but very soon shook his head.

  A geography boy might be glamorous, but the job was hard work – the equivalent of learning the “knowledge” before qualifying as a London black cab driver. Hence the not infrequent sight on a city street corner of a group of boys huddled round the page of an atlas torn from an in-flight magazine, and asking each other questions.

  Providing the correct answer to tough questions – such as “What is the capital of Finland?” – was only part of the skill required if you were to be a first-rate geography boy. You had to be able to judge the character of your “mark”, and to be able to make a reasonable guess at their country of origin – or surreptitiously read the address label on their knapsack. Above all, you had to have a thick skin, for nine out of every ten foreigners approached would respond with crude language. A few would even cuff the boy who approached them.

  But the successful one out of ten could make it all worthwhile. For some reason Norwegians were the best. If you could start up a conversation with a visitor from say, Oslo, you were unlikely to go away empty-handed – provided of course you got the patter right.

  And provided you delivered it with conviction.

  “Phauw! From Norway! My brother is a student in Oslo. He likes it very much. Do you like Kuwisha?”

  If such a question got an answer, it was a sign that the visitor was sniffing the bait; if they answered a second question, they were hooked. And by the third question, the exchange had become a conversation, at the end of which any street boy worth his salt would have “borrowed” one hundred ngwee.

  The most demanding of the street-children jobs was that of a collection boy. “Very risky, but good money,” said Rutere, watching Ntoto for his reaction. Chief requirements were an angelic appearance, a good knowledge of the scriptures and a Fagin-like skill in pick-pocketing, or in this case, stealing from the church collection basket.

  But if one were caught it was curtains. The righteous wrath of a congregation that discovered that there was a sinner in their midst, and that the cherubic altar boy was stealing their hard earned mites, was fearsome, and their reaction had an ecumenical certainty. Culprits had been lynched in the past. Those collection boys who went undetected, however, could go on to lead a congregation, and have a whole flock to fleece.

  The two friends continued to explore their options.

  Customs boy? This involved greeting a tourist on the street and claiming that their “father” had been on immigration duty and had helped the visitor through customs; and was followed up by a request for a loan that would be repaid when they returned through the airport. “Just ask for Chiluba, senior officer, security.”

  Again, Ntoto just shook his head.

  “Whatever you decide,” declared Rutere. “You are my friend.”

  The two boys spat on the palm of their right hands, did a high five, spat again, this time on the other’s hand, rubbed it in the dust, and punched their hearts.

  “I have decided, Rutere. I will become the Kireba area boy.”

  Cyrus was not surprised. Word on the street had long been that Ntoto was in the running to become area boy for Kireba, the equivalent of a ward boss.

  It was a tough job that called for a tough individual, equally capable of inciting a riot, imposing discipline or creating mayhem, conscripting residents to serve as rent-a-crowd mobs, ready to demonstrate at short notice, home or away. And it was the job of the area boy, working closely with the local member of parliament, to supply these mobs on demand, for a few ngwee per head.

  The job required ruthlessness, courage and perseverance, and street cunning, all qualities which Ntoto had. But it was also dangerous. Rutere was about to ask questions when the post office double door swung open. The woman behind the counter raised her head.

  There was mail for Harrods, about half a dozen items, and Ntoto handed over the usual fee – the equivalent of the postage on the envelopes. The woman held out her hand fo
r more.

  “Service charge has gone up.”

  “Will you credit me?” Ntoto asked.

  She pointed to a hand-printed sign, taped above her desk: “No credit today – try tomorrow!”

  Alongside was a picture of Jesus, with a typewritten homily: “God is my Light.”

  Ntoto tried to read the newspaper on her desk upside down.

  “No free reading.”

  She studied him through bloodshot eyes. “Go!”

  Ntoto emerged empty-handed – though the woman had allowed him to check that there was no postcard.

  “Perhaps it was stolen,” said Cyrus Rutere, more worried, it seemed, than Ntoto, who rummaged through a pile of rotting fruit outside the market. Rutere squatted on his haunches, letting the red dust of Kuwisha trickle through his fingers and make a pattern that spelt the initials of the Mboya Boys’ missing centre-forward.

  Titus Ntoto handed Rutere a banana, overripe to the point of being black, and the boys took it in turns to suck out the sweet contents. Now sitting cross-legged on the kerb alongside his friend, Ntoto gave a non-committal grunt, and kept his eye on the askari guarding the entrance to the Asian shop across the busy city road.

  “Perhaps.”

  “Why did the post lady want more money?”

  “The price has inflated,” said Ntoto.

  “What do you mean, Ntoto? Inflated?”

  “The lady says it is the fault of the matatus. The cost of her journey has risen from 20 ngwee to 30 ngwee in two months only.”

  “Everything is costing more,” said Rutere.

  One chore remained. They had yet to collect Charity’s note from the Central Bank governor, and this could not be delayed – after all, they had promised airmail delivery.

  They made their way along the dusty streets, keeping a sharp eye open for askaris. The boys were like chameleons. The colour of their ragged clothes, grey and brown, became an urban camouflage; their skinny brown and dusty legs merged with drab pavements; the grey of their torn shorts was the colour of the rubbish heaped on street corners; all the time their demeanour was apologetic and as submissive as a scavenging wild dog and just as attentive to danger.

  They blended into a fading city. The skyscrapers of the 1960s, evidence that Africa was resurgent, the faces of commercial optimism that went hand in hand with political liberation, had become dull, featureless office blocks now, lining Uhuru Avenue, the potholed thoroughfare which ran through the heart of the city.

  In its cracked pavements, every few yards a paving stone had been lifted, revealing a jumbled junction of telephone wires, or an intersection of pipes, or simply a hole, dug for a long abandoned purpose, starting to fill with detritus.

  There was no rubbish like Kuwisha’s rubbish. It had been sifted and assessed countless times by countless hands, a super-efficient form of recycling, driven by poverty and not by green principles. By the time it was eventually carted away by the barrow men, it had been reduced to a dry sludge of no conceivable value at all.

  On the pavements the street sellers set up their booths and displayed their wares in front of buildings once totems of progress and modernity. Now they were landmarks of an ancien régime that was dead or dying.

  The boys’ destination, the Central Bank of Kuwisha, was soon to move back into slightly refurbished headquarters from its temporary home at the posts and telecommunications building.

  This last redoubt of an old order was vainly attempting to keep state control of information as effective as a fortress on the Maginot Line. On Uhuru Avenue banks that had been built like castles, and grubby state-owned hotels, seemed like whales cast up on a beach, stranded by the departing tide.

  Mobile phones and internet cafés, deregulation and privatisation had overtaken these monuments from the past. But within them, the workers defended their interests from behind a series of barricades: messengers, tea-makers, small boys, clerks, secretaries and security staff, all protected by filing cabinets with drawers missing, broken typewriters and three-legged tables marked Property of GoK. These were the weapons of the poor bloody infantry, frontline troops in the state’s battle against change.

  Any visitor who wanted to get access had first to get past the security guard, behind a desk whose top was stained with the patina of ages, and who insisted on the visitor’s name being entered in a grubby exercise book. Then, after waiting for a lift that didn’t work, such a visitor climbed flights of stairs, passing landings stinking of urine, until the outer sanctum of the permanent secretary, or the minister, or the chief executive of the state-owned industry was reached.

  In the ante-room to the inner sanctum, where a blast of tepid air from the noisy air conditioner made the drab curtains sway, the governor’s secretary moved with the speed of a sleep-walker under water as she looked for Charity’s letter.

  At first she claimed that there was no letter; then maintained that it was in the governor’s office, which was locked. Only when Ntoto spotted the envelope on her desk, partially concealed by a telephone directory, did she surrender it.

  The boys began the long trudge back to Kireba.

  17

  Dr Adrian Mullivant, a much-travelled expert and consultant for UKAID, knocked on the steel door of Furniver’s office and was shown into the upstairs flat by Didymus Kigali.

  Mullivant, in his mid-forties, had a head of black hair thick enough and healthy enough to make Furniver jealous. And he was inseparable from a pair of dark glasses, which as often as not sat atop his head.

  He had flown in the day before from Darfur, he told Furniver. Respected throughout the aid community, his degree in development studies from the University of Sussex had been followed by a gap year spent in Sudan, working as the information officer for a voluntary aid agency. A couple of years later, he applied for a place at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, where he completed a well-regarded PhD. This was followed by a two-year spell with WorldFeed, working in the Central America section as a researcher.

  As Mullivant acknowledged, it was a splendid job, but he left for a simple reason: “I missed Africa – wanted to stay in development and make a contribution to the place, and I wanted to be my own boss,” he told Furniver, who nodded sympathetically.

  The two men were sitting in the living room of the flat, waiting for Kigali to bring in the coffee. For a moment, Furniver wondered if he should show Mullivant the draft of his annual review, but already the man was starting to irritate him.

  He persevered.

  “What’s brought you here?”

  “In town for the aid conference, to present a paper on gender and savings. Read yours, by the way.”

  Furniver knew he should never have circulated that address he had presented to the Kuwisha Economic Society; and he regretted the title, which made him appear flippant: “Women on Top: The Money beneath the Mattress”.

  “And to launch my book,” added Mullivant.

  He brought out his briefcase.

  “Thought you might enjoy reading this.”

  Mullivant signed a copy of his book, Sowing the Seed, Reaping the Fruit, and presented it to Furniver.

  “It’s on sale at the conference – 10 per cent discount.”

  He pointed to a footnote on page 24 which cited the “pioneering work in this field by Edward Furniver”, and sat back expectantly.

  “Very, er, kind of you,” said Furniver.

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “You still working for the UN Development Programme’s small business unit?”

  “Not exactly,” said Mullivant. “On attachment to the Ford Foundation, and working closely with UKAID.”

  “Ah, yes.”

  “Now doing work on the informal sector. Right up UNDP’s street, so I’ll go back to them.”

  “Jolly good.”

  There was a pause.

  The silence was about to become embarrassing, when Kigali brought in coffee. Furniver moved a model car fashioned out of wire, and made by a for
mer street boy, to make room on the table.

  “Point about my line of business is that it is not really about banking at all. Often all that’s needed is the money to buy a pair of pliers,” he said.

  “Mind if I take notes?”

  “Go ahead.”

  With a fluency that came to him when he was talking about his work, Furniver outlined the principles on which the bank operated. “Trouble is, if you are a street kid, or left school early, no prospect of a job, you cannot afford a decent meal, let alone the price of a pair of decent pliers. You can’t get a loan from a commercial bank. Can’t get past the front door in fact. Don’t really blame the banks.”

  “Presumably because the ratio of loan to return is too low, and their high risk profile?”

  Furniver blinked.

  “Not to mention weak presentational capacity and inappropriate attitudes to societal conventions,” Mullivant continued.

  “Hadn’t thought of that,” said Furniver. “I assumed it was because the little blighters usually haven’t washed for years. Make other customers run a mile. Can’t blame ’em. I meet most of my clients at Harrods.”

  “Harrods?”

  “Local bar.”

  More note-taking accompanied the disclosure. Furniver soon noticed that everything he said was translated, as if he were speaking a foreign language. And as he entered words and phrases into his notebook he could hear Mullivant’s muttered interpretation.

  “It is not as if there is no money (Liquidity is not a problem), the biggest snag is that they own bugger all (No security). And another thing. I have yet to meet someone who does not want to do better. Work bloody hard, but keep their money under the mattress (Excellent work ethic). So would I in their shoes. Who wants to put it in one of those banks on Uhuru Avenue? Takes them half an hour to get there; another half hour in the queue; then they have to risk thieves and pick-pockets on the way back home (Technological and societal hurdles). And at current rates of interest – they cannot keep pace with inflation.”