by Ian McDonald
‘They do not seem to be gaining on us,’ Faraway said, peering out the still-open door and the dust billowing into the ATV. A small herd of Thompson’s gazelles scattered in every direction from Gaby’s killing wheels.
Faraway spoke something short and savage in Luo then said in English, ‘I regret to inform you that things have just become most serious.’
The helicopter came in a hammer of sound so low and loud everyone in the ATV ducked. The car plunged into a whirlwind of dust thrown up by the rotors. The helicopter turned in the air in front of them and hovered.
‘Go south!’ William shouted. ‘To the edge of the Chaga. They will not dare follow us there.’
Dare I lead them there? Gaby thought, activating the internal satellite tracker and flicking on the wipers to clear the dust-filmed windscreen.
Lazily, the helicopter drifted after them. It moved effortlessly across the sky, like a cheetah stalking a wounded impala, that the cheetah knows it can run down and kill when it finally tires of playing. Oksana had made sure that Gaby knew the specifications of every aircraft, military and civilian, in the East African theatre. Those black insect-things under the stub wings are air-to-surface missiles. That thin black proboscis is a chain-gun. Five hundred rounds a minute will shred you and your car and your friends and your story of a lifetime like pissed-on toilet paper. Five hundred rounds a minute, and all you have to bluff them with is to keep driving south, south, south.
The dirt road dissolved into high acacia plain. Flat dark clouds were rolling down from the mothermass anchored to the distant mountain, spreading slowly out across the land that shivered like liquid with heat haze. Between the two ran a line of shadow: the edge of the Chaga. Terminum. Gaby McAslan drove straight into the line of darkness at one hundred kilometres per hour.
‘They are still with us,’ Faraway shouted from the back. Flirting, the helicopter swept in to harry the little car from the left and the right. It ducked down in front of it in a shatter of engines to try to get the driver to swerve. The driver did not swerve. She drove on to that line of darkness that minute by minute was emerging from the heat dazzle into shapes, silhouettes, seductions. Like a mirage, the Chaga deceived. Its trick was to play with space so that you were always nearer to it than you thought. The darkness Gaby saw lifting out of the heat-haze was not terminum. It was the great upthrust of life she had seen and marvelled at from the baobab on the Namanga road, that the researchers called the Great Wall. Terminum was elsewhere. Terminum was right in front of them. Terminum was under their wheels.
Gaby slammed to a stop. The helicopter passed raucously overhead and pulled a high gee turn.
‘We lost the APCs a kilometre back,’ Faraway reported.
Gaby did not hear him. She stared at the edge of the Chaga, one hundred metres in front of her. One hundred metres. Two days. If she sat in this seat and did not move, the Chaga would come to her, grow around and into and through her and take her to another world. She could step out of this car and walk to it and take off her clothes and lie down in it and feel it press into the skin of her back, like the old Vietnamese torture in which they tied people over bamboo and let it grow through them.
‘Gaby.’
‘The helicopter?’ she asked.
‘It’s standing off about half a kilometre west of us,’ Faraway said.
‘Go closer,’ William whispered. ‘Their guns and rockets can shoot a long way. Get as close as you dare.’
As close as she dared was fifty metres. The helicopter held its station, the black nose of its chain-gun locked on the beetle-blue ATV.
‘Closer,’ William whispered. Gaby moved the ATV in until she could smell the musky, fruity, sexy perfume of Chaga through the vents. The helicopter gingerly waltzed a little nearer.
‘Do these bastards not give up?’ Faraway asked.
‘Closer,’ William ordered a third time and this time Gaby drove until the pods and bulbs of Chaga-stuff popped beneath her tyres and the hexagonal mosaics cracked and spilled orange ichor that blossomed into helixes and coils of living polymer. The helicopter darted in, suddenly swung high in the air so that its rotors looked like the sails of a insane windmill, then spun away and receded across the Chyulu Plain and was seen and heard no more.
‘Yes!’ Faraway shouted. Tembo smiled like a man who knows his prayers have been answered. Gaby leaned forward until her forehead touched the top of the steering wheel and tried to stop her hands shaking.
‘Go west,’ William said ‘We should follow the edge until we come to the Olosinkiran road. They are South Africans over there. We can trust them.’
Gaby put her foot on the accelerator.
And the blue Nissan All Terrain Vehicle died.
‘Oh no,’ said Gaby McAslan, turning and turning and turning the ignition, pumping and pumping and pumping the gas pedal. The diesel pressure lamp glowed at her. ‘Oh no no no no no.’
Tembo got out and put up the hood. He beckoned to Gaby. Chaga-stuff crackled and burst beneath the soles of her boots. Strange pheromones challenged her.
‘I think we have a problem here.’
Compressor, fuel lines, cylinder head wore coats of tiny sulphur-yellow flowers, like miniature cauliflower buds. As Gaby watched, not wanting to believe what her eyes were showing her, the plague of flowers spread to the oil pump, oil filter and engine block. Tendrils were rising from the open flower heads on the cylinder block, waving sentiently in the sunlight. In under a minute the engine compartment was a pulp of pseudo-coral and oily metal. A sudden bang, like a shot. The fuel cap had blown off. Yellow fungus dripped from the fuel pipe. The body panels over the fuel tank were bowed out. The tyres popped little blue blooms around their rims. Something like crystalline rust was trying to work its way along the paintwork under the protective lacquer. Gaby yelped. The synthetic soles of her heavy-duty boots were blistering. There was man-made stretch fibre in her jodhpurs, in her underwear. It would eat that.
She should have obeyed T.P.’s panties catechism to the letter.
She jumped onto the hood of the ATV to get away from the treacherous earth.
‘What is the finance company going to say about this? I only just made the first payment.’
‘I do not think you are going to get much satisfaction from your insurers,’ Tembo said ruefully.
They were saying these little things because none of them dared think about the big things. At terminum. Angry Azerbaijanis behind them. Sixty kilometres of semi-desert on either side. No food. No water. No means of communication.
‘Shit! The disc!’
Tembo seized the camera and ran as fast as he could out of the Chaga into the virgin savannah. Gaby saw the flexible disc heliograph in the sun, Tembo unbutton his pants and then Faraway asked her to please spare his friend’s dignity.
‘Just pray his digestion is good today,’ he said.
The camera he brought back was a purulent mass of lichens and pseudo-fungi. Gaby winced at the SkyNet sticker on the side as responsibility went in and opened up inside her like the Gae Bolga of her childhood legends, the belly spear that unfolded a thousand barbs and tore out your guts. Mrs Tembo and Sarah and Etambele had waved their father off that morning and Gaby McAslan could not bear the responsibility that they might never be waving him home again. They could die out here, or be vanished by the UN, like Peter Werther, which is worse than dying to those who wait outside. She had put them all into this place and did not have an idea how to get them out.
‘Could we walk?’ she asked plaintively.
‘You tell us where, we will walk,’ Faraway said. ‘After all, it is only sixty kilometres.’
‘We have no water,’ Tembo said. ‘And Gaby would burn before she went ten kilometres. Also, we have no weapons.’
‘There are lions?’ Gaby asked.
‘Leopards are more common around the edges of the Chaga. But the biggest danger is from gangs of bandits who pick over the abandoned villages. We would be safer in the hands of the Azeris than the scavengers.�
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Gaby wrapped her bare arms around her knees. Her shoulders were already starting to feel hot. The Chaga had risen to ankle height. Terminum was several metres north of them.
‘So what do you suggest we do?’ Gaby asked plaintively.
Tembo looked at her, the land, the Chaga, the sky.
‘I suggest we set fire to the car.’
‘The hell with that. I worked damn hard for this car.’
‘It is lost, Gaby. The column of smoke will be visible from a very great distance. UNECTA has Chaga Watch balloons every few kilometres. They would call in an airborne patrol.’
‘And if the military see it first? Or these scavengers?’
‘They are cowards,’ William said forcefully. ‘They would not dare go into the Chaga, soldiers or scavengers.’
Gaby watched the interior of her car break out into pin-head sized scarlet blisters.
‘Do it,’ she said. ‘Torch it.’ It was only a car. The Chaga could have it. The Chaga could have the clothes on her body and leave her naked and sunburned, as long as the disc Tembo had hidden in his rectum remained inviolate.
The men opened the doors. The red beads had swollen into orange puffballs that burst into clouds of peppery dust as Gaby rummaged in the back for her spare diesel can. The metal had resisted the spores, though the cap had wedged tight around a crust of saffron crystals. Faraway wrenched it off and gave Gaby the honour of liberally anointing her own car with fuel. Before the Chaga could devour the diesel, she lit a length of tattered handkerchief with her cigarette lighter and dropped it on the driver’s seat.
The car went up in a satisfying blossom of flame. The refugees started the short walk back to Kenya. By the time they found a place comfortably far from terminum to sit and wait the ATV was burning nicely in a gobble of fire and carcinogenic black thermoplastic smoke. Gaby watched it burn. Tembo had been right. It was lost to her already, but it is one thing to have it taken from you and another to have to give it away with your own hands.
‘How long do you think?’ she asked.
Tembo shrugged. The smoke coiled into a neat twister that leaned across the edgelands towards the east.
How much burning is there in one Nissan All Terrain Vehicle? Gaby thought, watching the paint blister and flake. She thought about fire, and she thought about fear, and in her extremity she saw the land beyond Scared, a calm and watered plain where you can watch twenty-five thousand pounds worth of car burn with equanimity, even serenity, because you understand that there is no point being scared any more because it cannot help you.
‘Do you want to play a game?’ she asked the men. ‘Kill the time. How about “I Spy”? I Spy with my little eye, something beginning with . . .’ She quested around for a mystery object.
‘“C”,’ Faraway said and that was the end of that game.
‘All right then, what’s the most frightened you’ve ever been?’ Without waiting for the men to agree to her time-killer, Gaby told about the time in her first year in London when she had been alone down in a tube station at midnight and a white boy with a Stanley knife had taken her money off her, and her cards, and her disc-player, and her expensive shoes though they neither fitted nor suited him and then told her he was going to cut long scars that would never heal properly across her cheeks and lips and forehead and breasts if she did not go down on her knees and suck his cock behind the defunct phonecard machine on the westbound platform and who ran off leaving her things when the last train came in a gust of electricity and hot air. She had gathered up all her things and when she got off at her stop, dumped the money and the cards and the disc-player and the expensive shoes and walked barefoot to her flat. They were polluted now. They were diseased. They would never lose the taint.
‘The most scared I have ever been,’ William whispered, ‘is going into the town with your camera in my bag. I felt that everyone could see it but had agreed not to tell me. I felt like I had a disease, or another face in the back of my head that was pulling ridiculous expressions and sticking its tongue out at people, but I could never see. When that white officer wanted to look into my bag, I did not know what to do. Every thought flew from my head. It is very frightening when you know that you must do something to save yourself but you cannot think what. But what is strange is that it was the most frightening thing I can remember, but it was also the most exciting, like all the people who could see into me and knew what I was really doing were jealous and wanted to do it too. Does this make sense?’
‘It does to me,’ Gaby said.
‘The most scared I ever was was the morning I woke up convinced I had Slim,’ Faraway said. ‘I met the woman in a club. She was a strange woman on a strange journey from somewhere to somewhere that went by way of me for a night. She had long ridged scars all over her arms and the backs of her hands. Scarification, you understand? But she was not of a tribe that thinks that sort of thing is beautiful. She had an interest in orifices. She loved to push things into body openings. There was a thing she would do with a champagne bottle. She could uncork one with her lower muscles. For a woman who can do a trick like that, I will buy as much champagne as she wants, provided it is that cheap stuff from India. She liked to do things with the corks, and the wire cages too. Ah! My poor foreskin! And other parts too. But it was worth it, for she made fiki-fiki like a animal, like something in heat.
‘When I woke in the morning I could not remember very much but there was a terrible burning pain in my f’tuba. And when I pissed, man! I thought I was going to die. It was pissing fire. What had this demon woman done to me? Of course, she was not there to ask. They never are, the women who are real demons. But the pain did not go away, and I thought it was some dreadful disease, maybe even Slim, and that no matter how many bottle of champagne she could uncork with her magic lips, it was not worth the death of the incomparable Faraway. That made me really afraid, so I went to my doctor because I thought that if I did have Slim, then it would be better to know so everyone could have a big party and tell me what a grand fellow I was before I died. So, the doctor looked up my dick with a fibreoptic thing and he falls over laughing and when he can talk again, he calls in his nurse, and she looks up my dick and falls over laughing and the next thing I know the room is full of doctors and consultants and nurses and porters and people who just heard a noise going on and wondered what they were missing, all looking up my dick and falling over laughing.
‘Do you know what they saw up there that made them fall over laughing? A sliver of red chilli pepper. That demon-woman! When I was asleep she had cut a tiny little slice of chilli and pushed it up my f tuba. Orifices! Devil! It was a week before I could walk straight, let alone piss with pleasure. It is funny now, but at the time, I tell you, my friends, this Faraway was never so frightened. I thought I would die. Really, truly.’
‘Of course, you have learned nothing from the experience,’ Tembo said.
Faraway grinned his huge grin. ‘I have learned never to leave chillis sitting around my home, and that is a very wise lesson for anyone.’
‘What happened to the strange woman?’ Gaby asked.
‘I saw her at clubs a few times, dancing with some other man, but she never came near me and I never went near her. Then I heard from a friend of a friend that she had died. She was playing a game in a hotel room with two men and a gun, but I do not know if it was an accident or on purpose. My friend of a friend said he thought there was a video, but the police were keeping it to sell around. But I never saw it. It is sad that her strange journey had to end that way.’
‘The most frightening moment of my life was caused by a pair of football shorts,’ Tembo said. Gaby hiccuped with laughter, but Faraway did not and he knew Tembo like a lover. ‘I was on the St Matthew’s Church in Shikondi’s under-18 football team, but my parents were poor and could not afford to buy me the team strip all at once. So for doing well in my exams I got the shirt, and for my birthday I got the socks and boots and when an uncle became a pastor and gave everyone
gifts to celebrate the event, I got the shorts. Because they were poor, they bought things that would last: the shorts were the very newest man-made fibre that would never wear out whatever you did to it. This made me think. You could throw these shorts on the rubbish heap and they would never rot away to nothing. They would always be a pair of football shorts. I would grow up, and get work, and marry if God blessed me, and have children, and the football shorts would not have changed. I would grow old, my children would marry and have children, and, if God blessed me, those children would have children, and the blue shorts, small size would not change. I would die, and be buried, and decay to bones and hair and still not one of those artificial fibres would have rotted. And then I stopped thinking about football shorts and thought about me. This would happen. It was not an idea, a maybe, an if. It was a certainty. These football shorts were a measure of my life. This me, that wore football strip and played for St Matthew’s Under-18, would one day breathe out and not breathe in again, would go cold and dark inside, would stop thinking and seeing and hearing and feeling, and stop being. It could not be escaped or got around. The most I could hope would be to delay it. I saw this, and it scared me like nothing has ever scared me. And I would have to go alone. No one I knew could go with me, or go before me and come back and tell me what was on the other side. I would go alone, and blind. That is why I found Jesus. Because he was the only one could go with me, who had been there, and seen what it was like, and could tell me what would happen. Because I need someone I can call to in the dark night when my wife and my children are sleeping and the fear of it wakes me up like something very very cold in my heart.’