Changa

by Ian McDonald

  ‘How old is it?’ The microlyte went round again.

  ‘About three years. We haven’t had a picture out of her in fourteen months, though the caesium batteries are still putting out current. Biggest ecological armageddon since the end of the dinosaurs, but mention radioactivity and it’s mass pants-pissing among the environmentalists.’

  They swooped away from the lost outpost of the human world. Gaby could make out the brown shore of Africa like a line of islands on the horizon of a dark ocean. Shepard opened up the engine and headed for home.

  ~ * ~

  24

  She briefed Shepard on last things in the Mahindra jeep out to the landing field. He would let her know when anything happened with William? Yes. He would corroborate her story if her banks and credit card companies got sniffy about replacing her plastic? Yes. He would write a report for her insurance company? Yes, if she thought it would do any good. He would back her up if the shit hit the fan with T.P.? Yes. He was sure UNECTA would swing behind her and not leave her persona non grata with the United Nations?

  ‘I think you can be pretty sure of that,’ he said as the Mahindra hit a rut and bounced all four wheels in the air. ‘In fact, I think I could give you my personal guarantee on it. You see . . .’

  ‘This is going to be an off-the-record, isn’t it? The gazelle, mind the fucking gazelle!’

  He minded the fucking gazelle.

  ‘Off the record, I may not be at Tsavo West much longer.’

  Her heart lurched. It was nothing to do with Shepard’s driving.

  ‘UNECTA are reorganizing their research staff. In the shuffling they’ve found they need a Peripatetic Executive Director. Superman without the blue pantyhose, flying hither and yon, trouble-shooting for UNECTA wherever there’s trouble that needs to be shot. It’s based at Kenyatta Centre, but it’s essentially a field job. It’s what I want, to be in it, not perched up in that glass penthouse with a desk and twenty tons of paper between me and what’s out there. It’s the sharp edge of Chaga research, boldly going where no one has gone before.’

  ‘When’s the selection panel?’

  ‘A week ago. Modesty should preclude, but I’m the only serious contender. Conrad Laurens, the bouncing Belgian, is the only one more highly qualified, and he can count on European Union backing, but there’s a lot of anti-Francophone feeling in the General Council at the moment, and at two hundred twenty pounds, he’s going to have trouble fitting into the phone box, let alone leaping out in his Captain UNECTA outfit to save the world. So, do you think you can put up with seeing a bit more of me around?’

  When the gods want to destroy you, they answer your prayers.

  They drove past work teams armed with chainsaws, felling the acacias that stood in the path of Tsavo West’s juggernaut retreat. The fellers pushed up their plastic visors and waved to the speeding Mahindra. A white Antonov stood on the shaved strip, feeding from a tanker truck.

  ‘Shepard,’ Gaby moaned in her five-year-old-with-dental-appointment voice. ‘Don’t send me back, I don’t want to go, don’t make me go.’

  He went to file her travel authorizations in the flight centre. She seemed to be the only passenger.

  ‘Can I see you again?’ she asked plaintively at the foot of the tail ramp. ‘I mean officially, not serendipitously. Like, um, you know, a date?’

  Shepard looked momentarily perplexed. He is going to shrug, Gaby thought. I could not bear it if he shrugs. When they shrug, it means they are saying a thing to please you, not because they want to.

  ‘Sure. I’d like to, very much. I’ll be in touch.’ He did not shrug. ‘At the very least, I owe you that interview I promised back in Kajiado.’ The wing root engines powered up, first left, then right. ‘Don’t forget this.’ He handed her a transparent zip-lock bag containing what the Chaga had left of her possessions. They consisted of a sleeveless denim top without buttons, a Gossard wonderbra, a pair of gold earrings, a silver Claddagh ring, a steel Parker ball-pen, a packet of Camels and a set of car keys. ‘Or this.’

  He handed her another zip-lock bag. This one contained the stained, dog-eared remains of a notebook bound in Liberty print. Gaby lifted the bag gingerly by the corner, suspicious of contamination. Then she realized what she was seeing.

  ‘Oh my God! You found it.’

  Shepard shrugged.

  ‘I called in a few markers. Turned up while they were clearing out Ol Tukai prior to the move. They found it in a sealed case in the bottom of a filing cabinet that had been put into storage when Barbara Bazyn moved the security division to Kajiado. God knows how long it’s been sitting there. It’s a mess, but when you consider what it’s been through, it’s hardly surprising.’

  Gaby studied the battered diary.

  ‘So, you came back,’ she whispered. ‘You kept your promise to T.P.’

  ‘What’s T.P. got to with it?’

  ‘He loved her. He helped her go into the Chaga to find Langrishe. He gave her the diary, made her promise to get it back to him whatever happened. Shepard, you knew them, what were they like?’

  ‘Insane.’

  ‘T.P. said that too.’

  ‘Obsessed. Intense. Too close to each other to be lovers.’

  ‘T.P. said no one loved the right way round.’

  ‘T.P. was right. But the diary proves nothing.’

  ‘Maybe not. But it gives me a weapon. Everywhere I go in this country I walk in her shadow, and I want to know why, and how, and who. And when I’ve done that, I want to exorcise her ghost so it won’t overshadow me any more.’ Gaby slipped the diary from its bag, weighed it in her hand. ‘Thank you Shepard. I owe you. And I’ll repay you, some day. What you deserve, I promise.’

  ‘I’ll think of something,’ Shepard said, shooing her up the loading ramp of the Antonov. ‘Now get out of here!’ He ran to the safety of the Mahindra.

  She was fastening her seat belt as the plane turned into its take-off run. He was waving at the wrong window, as those who wave to aeroplanes always do. The engine noise rose to a scream. The little jet dipped its nose, shuddered down the dirt strip and threw itself into the air. The tops of the acacias and the control centre and the iridescent vees of the microlytes and the tanker truck and the dusty white Mahindra were falling away and now Tsavo West was just a few lost Lego bricks on the huge burning plain and the Chaga a dark disc curving imperceptibly out of sight.

  He is like that, she thought. Most of the men she had passed through her life had been pieces of artifice. Shepard was landscape. He went out into the things around him. He curved imperceptibly out of sight. He was not a product of himself, a man become his own image. He blended into his background, became part of it, drew strength from red earth and heat and empty spaces.

  The Antonov levelled off. Gaby looked out of the window. She loved to look out of airplane windows. Flying never ceased to astound her. Today a miracle happened. A sign. The clouds around the mountain moved, and grew thin, and broke, and dissolved away and there, shining in the afternoon sun, great, high and unbelievably white in the sun, and everything that Hemingway had said, but so much more, were the snows of Kilimanjaro.

  Then the Antonov banked and she could see them no more. Gaby pulled the zip-lock bag containing the diary out from under her seat. From the second plastic bag she took her packet of Camels, lit one and settled back to read.

  The Liberty print was stained and blotched, the binding boards black with mould. The glue had dissolved, the book was held together by its stitching. It looked like the log of a voyage to hell.

  Niamh O’Hanlon, Gaby deciphered from the fly sheet. No wonder she had called herself by another name.

  To every book its inscription. I have written my name in black ink inside the cloth cover but the syllables are harsh and clashing in this land of whispered sibilants and strong consonants. How much better the name Langrishe gave me: Moon; generous, looping consonants, vowels like two eyes, two souls looking out of the paper. One half of T.P.’s final gif
t to me: the journal, cloth-bound and intimate in Liberty print. I treasure it, hug it to me, companion and confessor. T.P.’s other gift to me I treated less kindly: black dragonfly wings shredded by the impact, struts snapped like the bones of birds. Already the Chaga is at work on it, converting the organic plastics into dripping stalactites of black slime. It is over an hour since I lost the beat of the helicopter in the undersong of the Chaga: my crash-landing must have looked sufficiently convincing for it to abandon the hunt. Forgive me T.P., but you would understand: skimming across the tree tops toward terminum with an Italian Mangusta behind me, expecting to be smashed at any second into nothingness by a thermal imaging Stinger missile, one’s options are somewhat limited. Sorry about the microlyte, T.P. But I will be good to the diary, I promise.

  Gaby resented this woman she did not know for her intimacy with T.P. Costello. There was another set of footprints, another smear of woman-musk on her Kenya. If she found Shepard’s name in these dirty pages crammed tight, tight with frenzied black ink, she would feed the fucking thing to a shredder.

  I told Shepard I wanted to lay your ghost, Gaby thought, but now I am the unseen shadow, arriving off the night-flight, following you through the streets of Nairobi, meeting with you T.P. Costello, Mrs Kivebulaya, Dr Peter Langrishe at the Irish Ambassador’s party. I come with you to Ol Tukai, I fly with you over the Chaga; I watch you come together and fuck in an Arab bed in a banda on the coast, I feel your jealousies and obsessions that take him in search of these mythical Chaga-builders that he loves more than you; and you, in pursuit of him. I am there when you pitch your tent in the ruins of the old Ol Tukai game lodge, I hear with you the voices coming out of the deep Chaga that you imagine to be Langrishe’s, calling you.

  I am beginning to wonder if my supplies will be sufficient. I had originally provisioned for twenty days. It may take that long just to reach the lower slopes of the mountain. The riotous Chaga-life confounds my senses of time and distance: I cannot judge how far, how fast I have come. I was so certain then; now my stupidity at thinking I can find one man - who, if I am honest with myself, which I rarely am, may not even be alive - in five thousand square kilometres of, literally, another world, astounds me. The sense of isolation is colossal.

  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.

  Two thirds down the second cigarette, Gaby decided she did not like this woman. Everything was too much with her: her descriptions, her feelings, her opinions, her experiences, her loving. She was like one of those dreadful Irish woman writers you see on late night talk shows who are terrifyingly articulate and think they have invented sex and no one else can possibly have any feeling or passion of true emotion in their lives. She is dark Gaby thought. Dark side of the moon.

  The Wa-chagga may be the last proud people in the New Africa with my dearly beloved leather jacket I must look like a fetish figure from a sword’n’sorcery fantasy.

  Gaby frowned and read again the lines at the bottom of the page and the top of the next. A third time, and they still did not make sense.

  . . . the last proud people in the New Africa with my dearly beloved leather jacket I must look like a fetish figure . . .

  She held the diary up to the reading lamp. There. So close to the spine you would only notice if you were looking. Two pages had been removed. The cut was very clean and straight. A surgical elision. Wide awake, Gaby fanned the pages against the light. Faults in the lie of the leaves indicated where other sections had been cut away. Towards the end there seemed fewer pages left than removed.

  The Sibirsk pilot bing-bonged. Weelson, Nairobi in five. Cyrillic No Smoking/Fasten Seat-belts lit up. The Antonov banked sharply. The who-slashed-it of the missing paper would wait. Right now, Gaby McAslan had to worry about what T.P. Costello was going to say to her.

  ~ * ~

  25

  T.P. did not say anything when he met her at Wilson airfield. He did not say anything when they got into the SkyNet Landcruiser, or as he drove into Nairobi. He did not say anything as they turned into Tom M’boya Street, or when he pulled in outside the SkyNet offices. It was when he switched off the car and gave the keys to Gaby that he spoke.

  ‘I’m getting out here.’

  ‘What do I do?’ Gaby asked plaintively.

  ‘What you do,’ T.P. Costello said, ‘is you take this thing home, you go to bed, you sleep for eighteen hours and tomorrow when you are fresh and sharp and bright you put on your most professional clothes and you come here and you report to Jake Aarons and you ask him if there are any assignments for SkyNet Satellite News’s new East Africa correspondent. And, because you’ll need it, you keep the car. What do you do?’

  As T.P. spoke, she had lowered her head until it touched the edge of the dashboard. Tears stained the thighs of the borrowed jeans.

  ‘You asshole,’ she whispered. ‘You fucking diseased asshole. I thought I was out of here.’

  ‘You almost were. You know why you are here and not at the check-in desk at Kenyatta being asked if you want smoking or non-smoking? Because it worked. That’s the only reason. Because at this very moment sub-rights are in the middle of the biggest bidding war since the Kilimanjaro Event as casters broad and narrow throw dollars and Deuschmarks at you. Because at this moment our dear friend Dr Dan is on his feet in the House demanding an enquiry into the allegations your report raised while the UN sends in its damage limitation boys to, in their words, “rotate the third Baku company out of active service”, which in our parlance is the first Ilyushin out of here. Because it’s trebles and clean consciences all round at the Thorn Tree. You took the risk. It worked. This time. You see, if you ever, ever do anything like that again without clearing with me, I will bounce you back to the bonnie Belfast so quick you’ll have friction burns on your beautiful ass. What’ll you have?’

  ‘Friction burns. On my ass,’ Gaby said, still not able to look up.

  ‘That’s correct,’ T.P. said, stepping out of the car. ‘Oh. I almost forgot. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Your friend Dr Shepard called while you were in flight. I think you should get whatever contacts you have working on this ASAP. Your stool-pigeon William. Seems he’s been moved from Tsavo West to Kajiado centre for further tests. They’re holding him in a special isolation section. Unit 12.’

  She had it. She had it all. She had been faithful to her guiding star and it had honoured her with more than she had asked of it. It had put her in front of the camera, but it had also given her a glimpse into its hidden heart that few humans had ever seen, and maybe, if she didn’t get stupid and try to play it too cool and wreck things, it had given her the man she wanted. The city, the land, surged with possibility. Something tapped on her window. She looked up. Standing on the Landcruiser’s running-board was a shaven-headed boy of nine or ten, tapping a forefinger on the glass and holding up for her to buy a model of Space Station Unity he had made out of wire coat-hangers and sliced up Heineken cans. Gaby laughed and sobbed simultaneously and remembered that she had forgotten to tell T.P. about the Moon diary.

  ~ * ~

  26

  From glory to glory.

  T.P. had begun the great Irish football war chant Ole, Ole Ole Ole five minutes before the final whistle. The team were still singing it as they headed for the showers.

  ‘One nil, one million nil,’ T.P. said as he collected his winnings from his UNECTA counterpart.

  It had been a memorable victory. Gaby looked forward to post-morteming the goal over much beer when the Manga Twins finished editing the video. Seventy fifth minute. Victor Luthu from accounts lofts it over UNECTA’s dreaded Nigerian mid-fielder Kojo Laing. It falls at Gaby McAslan’s feet and the left wing opens up before her like the gates of heaven. Into the box and the best cross of her life over two defenders and Tembo’s head is there, rising, to smack it into the back of the net. She jumped onto
Faraway, gaudy as a macaw in his woman-impressing goalkeeper’s outfit, wrapped him in freckled arms and legs.

  ‘Hey Kenya! I love this man! I used to think he was a wanker, now I think he is Jesus. They throw everything at him, Faraway stops the lot.’

  ‘Want to swap shirts, Gaby?’ Faraway said, recovering cool.

  Oksana Telyanina ran over and hugged them both. She had been seconded on to Team SkyNet. The Siberians had never enough people in the same place to field a team of their own. In her cut-offs over cycle shorts, borrowed boots and tattoos she was an intimidating left back.

  ‘I near peed my pants!’ she shouted. Over her shoulder, beside the corner flag, Gaby glimpsed another person.

  Shepard.

  ‘You!’ she shrieked, throwing herself on him.

  ‘You look like a horse with that long hair and those tight lycra shorts,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘I would dearly love to pull them down right now and bend you over the substitute’s bench.’