Drugs to Forget

by Martin Granger

  Tom didn’t reply. He just sat there eyes wide, frantically waving his hands in front of his open mouth.

  ‘Hey, you okay?’

  Nick could just about make out the answer through Tom’s swelling lips.

  ‘Water, give me water. It’s not ketchup, it’s bloody chilli!’

  The film crew turned up on time. There were four of them in a rusty shooting brake. One of them introduced himself to Tom.

  ‘Hi, I’m Kevin, your cameraman,’ he said in English with hardly a trace of an accent. ‘This is Ahmad, Arief and Henry; sound, sparks and grip. Where would you like us to set up?’

  Nick stepped off the veranda to shake Kevin’s hand. ‘I’m Nick, friend of Michael. I’m afraid you won’t get much out of Tom at the moment, stupid bastard’s swallowed a mouthful of neat chilli. Can hardly get his mouth open, his tongue has swollen so much. His arms are okay though so he will be able to point you to the right bits.’

  Kevin didn’t seem at all perturbed by this mute film director. ‘That’s all right, the others don’t speak English anyway so I’ll have to translate. Just let me know the sort of thing you want and I’m sure you’ll be happy with the result. It’s for the BBC isn’t it?’

  Nick knew this was the ace he had up his sleeve. Michael had told him that these guys would do practically anything to get on British television. That’s why they were prepared to do this shoot for peanuts.

  ‘Oh yes, and all the good documentary channels in the States,’ he said, putting his arm around Kevin’s shoulders. ‘Make sure you give Tom your names, don’t want to get the spelling wrong on the credits.’

  Michael arrived as the crew were unpacking their gear. He was wearing a crisp white open-necked shirt and held a satchel of documents in his hands. Nick explained Tom’s demise and Michael fell about laughing.

  ‘Plusn sipp offer err,’ mumbled Tom.

  ‘I think he wants you to sit over there for your interview,’ said Nick, pointing to a chair on the veranda and trying to keep a straight face at the same time.

  Kevin leapt to their aid. ‘Ah, interview; if you want it there we’ll have to get some lighting up. I know it’s outside but we’ll have to balance that shade with this sunlight. It’s pretty fierce so we’ll need a few watts.’

  Tom suddenly felt thankful for his condition. He’d never directed a film shoot before and this guy sounded like he knew what he was doing. Now he wouldn’t sound like a fool. He could just sit there and point, and if they didn’t understand him then he was sure that Kevin would sort it out. He put his thumbs up towards the crew and sat down to write a few questions that he thought would be useful to ask Michael.

  The crew worked like clockwork. Lamp stands were erected, the tripod positioned on the veranda, and a microphone was placed on a long metal arm. Then Arief started to shout something at Kevin from the other side of the hut.

  ‘He wants to know where he can tap into the power for the lights,’ he explained to Tom.

  Tom shrugged.

  ‘We don’t have any power,’ intervened Nick. ‘Not that sort anyway, unless you can run your lights off butane gas.’

  ‘Okay, no problem,’ said Kevin, looking not in the least perturbed. ‘We’ll get a generator.’

  The generator looked more like a rusty baked potato machine than an appliance that created electricity. Where it came from Tom couldn’t say, but here it was wheeled out of the surrounding jungle.

  ‘We need some flags,’ said Kevin, and shouted orders at Henry, in what Tom could only guess was Malay. Why they needed flags God only knew.

  He was answered twenty minutes later. The flags were flat pieces of plywood, painted black and mounted onto stands. Their purpose, to give some shade to the camera lens and some of the lights. A pain in his mouth was little price to pay for not sounding a complete idiot.

  ‘Amazing isn’t it,’ said Nick drawing up alongside. ‘Ask for this stuff in the West and there’d be requisition orders, stock checks and transport delays, yet here a couple of guys run off into the undergrowth and come back with a time machine and some handmade shades. Developing country? Who’s developing what I’d like to know?’

  Kevin declared that he was ready for the interview. Nick said he would read out Tom’s questions. Kevin asked Michael not to look into the lens and pretend that he wasn’t there.

  ‘Just chat to Nick as if there are only the two of you. Try not to interrupt and overlap his question though, as it will be difficult to use that in the edit.’

  Tom took a mental note of these instructions. Next time his mouth might be able to work.

  The generator was fired up and the lights came on, but this time there came a shout from Ahmad.

  ‘What’s up?’ asked Nick.

  ‘I should think that’s obvious,’ replied Kevin. ‘There’s no way we can record sound with the noise from that generator. It sounds like a B-2 bomber.’

  Another twenty minutes went by whilst fifty metres of cable were found and the generator, encased in huge sheets of Styrofoam, was placed as far from the veranda as they could put it. After all of this Tom started to wonder whether he really did want to be a budding film director, but when things had settled down the interview went really well. Michael was a natural. He described his suspicions about the laboratory near Sidoarjo and explained how an assistant working there, who didn’t want to be named, began to confirm these suspicions. The microbes, which they had obtained from the raid, were very dubious and didn’t appear to tie in with the export orders. These bugs, if released into the population, could be very dangerous.

  At the end of the interview Kevin repositioned the lights and moved the camera to over Michael’s shoulder.

  ‘If you thumb through those documents, I’ll take some big close-ups.’ He looked up at Tom. ‘You could use them as stand-alone shots or cut them into his interview so you could edit the soundtrack.’

  Tom nodded vigorously, trying to work out how this would assist the editing. Thank goodness he had been given Kevin. This guy was a real saviour. Once more he made a mental note of the technique. The ‘cutaways’ as Kevin was calling them were not just giving the viewer more information, they would allow the editor to shorten bits of interview without the audience even knowing.

  ‘Great,’ said Kevin as he finished the last shot. ‘We’ll just check those back before we strike the lights. Do you want to do any GVs?’

  Now that was one term that Tom had heard of. General Views. They were used to set scenes, as backgrounds to voice-overs, and just attractive pictures to give atmosphere. It sounded fun. He scribbled down some ideas on a piece of paper. Kevin raised his eyebrows, they were a bit ambitious. Crowds of villagers walking through the marketplace. One villager stops Michael to ask him a question.

  But Kevin was not to be defeated. He asked Michael’s uncle to wake the sleeping villagers from their siestas and to meet in the empty marketplace. The bemused gathering waited in a huddle. Kevin marked a line in the dirt and divided the crowd into two groups facing each other. He gently cajoled the elderly to stand at the front, and the young and the ones on bicycles and carts to wait at the rear. He positioned the camera to focus on the spot just above his eyeline.

  ‘Place yourself about halfway back in one of the groups,’ he asked Michael. ‘Now, when I say “Tindakan” I want you all to walk or ride at normal pace towards each other. Got that?’

  By the looks on their faces some did and some didn’t, but when Kevin shouted the order, they all began to move. Kevin bent down to look through the eyepiece. He switched the camera on and to his delight watched a throng of villagers milling around in the marketplace. And on cue Michael walked into shot and was detained by a young man who held him there in deep conversation.

  ‘And, cut!’ exclaimed one jubilant cameraman.

  Eighteen

  Addis Ababa International Airport at six-thirty in the morning isn’t the most congenial place to set up a small portable office. Especially if you have had hours on
a plane with only fitful sleep. Nathalie had left Heathrow at nine o’clock in the evening with a head full of instructions and a pile of notes to go through. She had decided to try to sleep and put everything on hold until her four-hour stopover. She wouldn’t arrive in Harare until around midday, and wouldn’t be getting any respite then, so that was the plan anyway. The trouble with best laid plans is that they often go awry so here she was, exhausted, perched on a plastic waiting-room seat, trying to process all the information she had been given. She placed her hand luggage on the chair next to her. There was one good thing about six-thirty in the morning. The in-transit hall was practically empty. She undid the zip and pulled out her laptop and project file. While the laptop was firing up she glanced at the call-sheet. Stefanie had done a good job in a short time. The Holiday Inn in Harare had been booked and a meeting set up with the local film crew on the afternoon of her arrival. She only hoped that she could stay awake long enough to convey any sense to them. Her difficult meeting with Geoff had ended well. This was helped by the fact that a message arrived from Nick in Java proclaiming a triumph of photography and a promise of great action footage from the Indonesian police force. Nick was always the optimist and his e-mail sounded pretty good.

  …high-quality professional footage of the local police force investigation and dramatic live-action of the laboratory raid. Credible evidence emerging concerning illegal and dangerous microbe manufacturing.

  Geoff had made an instant reply asking Nick to stay on in Surabaya, to follow the progress of the investigation and, in Geoff’s words:

  Make sure you get your huge mitts on that footage!

  And Nick would know that Geoff wasn’t prone to exclamation marks.

  In the same e-mail Tom was asked to take the next flight, or flights as it happened, to Harare to meet up with Nathalie. Nathalie looked at his schedule, it was worse than hers. Nearly twenty-four hours, with stopovers in Singapore and Johannesburg on the way. He was also checked into the Holiday Inn but she didn’t expect to see him until the next morning. A bing bong from the departures board made her look up, but her onward flight was yet to appear. She looked at her watch, barely 7.00 am. It would be five in London, too early to make the call that she was anxious to make. As her meeting with Geoff had ended he suddenly remembered a message he had for her. A Doctor Styne had popped into the office to see Nathalie. The woman with transient global amnesia had now been found again. Her name was Esther Phillips. Apparently she was regaining some of her memory. She had been on some sort of drug trial that may have affected her recall. They were still trying to establish what the trial was about and where it took place. Esther was keen to thank Nathalie for her help in getting her to hospital. When Nathalie had exploded and demanded why Geoff hadn’t told her this before, he looked genuinely surprised and wondered what all the fuss was about. And Nathalie had done just that on the first leg of her flight, wondered what it was all about. How on earth had that woman got hold of her business card? It had been too late to visit Esther before her trip but she was anxious to know the details and couldn’t wait to talk to her.

  Whiffs of breakfast were starting to trickle across the hall. The coffee shops and restaurants were opening up for business. Nathalie had turned down the offerings on the plane; first, she was trying to establish a normal sleep pattern and second, it looked inedible. Croissants and pastries were becoming international fare and there was little the airport could do to ruin those so she made her way to the nearest food outlet. She was the only customer and there was plenty of space to instal her laptop and lay out her papers. She nibbled at the croissant whilst tapping in her notes. The priority was to film the WEXA group under the guise of the immunisation film without drawing too much attention to themselves. The first obstacle would be to take in the confidence of the film crew. Lloyd had already checked them out and they seemed a pretty broad-minded bunch. A couple of them had got into trouble with the authorities some months back for so-called anti-establishment programming. It might not be a matter of worrying whether they would be politically against the exercise but more that they didn’t want to get burned twice. She would have to tread carefully but in her past experience crews tended to leap at the opportunity to film hard-edged footage. Too many of them had spent hours in corporate offices or factory production lines churning out boring images and pointless interviews. She scheduled the WEXA part of the programme as ‘filming local colour and interviews’. Any official studying her itinerary would be none the wiser. Two days had been allocated for the immunisation shoot in Shurugwi district. Although she would have liked to get the WEXA material in the can as soon as possible she had decided to schedule it for the second day. Her entourage would be all over them for the first day, fascinated by the ins and outs of a professional film shoot. By the second they would realise that it was a lot of standing around and setting up of lights and tripods. Most people let them get on with it by then. Lloyd had arranged for their WEXA contacts to be in Shurugwi and, for some of Bagatelle’s dollars, had commandeered a couple of huts in the compound. It shouldn’t be difficult for Nathalie to escape for a couple of hours to film scenes with some of the so-called villagers to get their opinion on the immunisation outreach programme, or so she was persuading herself anyway.

  The coffee shop was filling up. A man balancing a hot mug of tea and a plate of pastries stared irritably at her. There were still a few other empty tables but it was evident that he wanted to sit at this one. She shuffled her papers into a pile and made room. He sat down without a word placing his steaming drink within centimetres of Nathalie’s laptop. She was reluctant to pack all her stuff up and move to another place so she just nudged her laptop towards the edge of the table and tried to concentrate on her next task. There was a file of correspondence from Lloyd that Stefanie had printed out for her. A lot of it referred to his meetings with Temba Murauzi whilst she was in America. Unfortunately it seemed with each meeting Temba was getting colder and colder feet. She gleaned that he had visited the Biomedivac Moroccan plant earlier in the year. He had won a prize and it was some sort of exchange scheme with the university. It didn’t seem as if Lloyd had got much more out of him on this topic. Initially when Lloyd had suggested Bagatelle Films could arrange a second visit as part of a scientific film he appeared interested. Now, it seemed that with each e-mail he was backing off, or at least becoming less enthusiastic. Lloyd had surmised that Temba was worried about the publicity the film would give him in his homeland. Lloyd also had a theory about this. When doing some background checks on the guy he had heard that Temba had frequented gay clubs. These were not only few and far between in Harare but also highly illegal. The homophobic laws in Zimbabwe had criminalised this activity for the last decade. Men could even get arrested for holding hands. If Lloyd’s intuition was right then the last thing Temba would want was attention being drawn to himself to the wrong authorities. He thought that Nathalie would have a better chance of encouraging him to take part, explain the distribution of the programme and perhaps excite him more about the scientific content of the project. Nathalie thought about this for a while. Her knowledge of pharmacology wasn’t that great, especially if she was going to persuade an expert. Her researcher, Tom, on the other hand had a degree in microbiology, she was sure they would speak the same language. And here came her dilemma. From the moment she met him she could tell Tom’s sexual orientation. She felt slightly disturbed about her own internal debate. Would one gay guy relate more to another gay guy than anyone else? Or was that a weirdly prejudiced thing to think? Would she as a woman be better at persuading another woman than a man? She was brought up with a jolt by the man next to her nearly spilling his drink on her laptop as he rose to catch his plane.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said sarcastically.

  He walked away without even looking at her.

  ‘And you have a nice day too,’ she called after him.

  She turned back to her notes. The interruption had cleared her head. Of course Tom was t
he right person to talk to him. It was nothing to do with their sexuality. Tom knew about bugs and that’s what the film would be about, initially anyway. If it came up that Temba was worried about the publicity then Tom could tell him that it wouldn’t be aired in Zimbabwe. She hadn’t known Tom long but from their short meetings she found him a gentle, amenable sort of guy. If anyone could persuade Mr Murauzi to take part, it would be Tom. She logged on to the airport WiFi system and sent a note to Lloyd asking him to set up a meeting. Despite the long wait in this holding area she didn’t want to become complacent and miss her next connection. She turned to her flight itinerary. The Ethiopian Airlines flight from Addis Ababa to Harare was due to take off at nine twenty-three, with the schedule claiming triumphantly ‘seating with above average legroom’. Nathalie, who was below five foot four, was not impressed and began wondering what ‘average legs’ looked like. She checked her flight number against the boarding gate that was now showing on the departures board, packed up her stuff and trudged wearily out of the in-transit lounge.

  ‘Welcome back Miss Nathalie,’ said Manny with a big smile, his large out-reached hands taking her bags.

  It had been raining. One of those short sharp warm late summer downpours. The pavements were shiny with water, the sun steaming off the surface.

  ‘Thank you Manny,’ said Nathalie. ‘I assume…my people have checked me in and prepaid again,’ she continued, nearly spilling out the word Bagatelle in her tiredness.

  ‘Of course Miss Nathalie, we’ve given you your same room and I’ve left a glass of cool juice to refresh you on your arrival. Would you also like me to send up some lunch?’

  ‘No, thank you Manny the juice will be fine. I’ve got to rush out to a meeting, so after I’ve had a quick shower I would be grateful if you would ring for a taxi.’

  ‘Certainly Miss Nathalie, I’ll take this to your room and you just dial zero when you’re ready. I’ll have a taxi waiting before you can reach the lobby.’