Changa

by Ian McDonald

  She felt his presence as a vibration in the water before he spoke.

  ‘Too much for you?’

  ‘It seems kind of abstract.’

  ‘Everything is, until the BDO gets here.’

  ‘Walk with me, Shepard.’

  He took her hand. No one had done that since she was eighteen. They bred them old-fashioned in the plains states. They walked along the water line, away from the fire and the people ground it and the lights of the hotel standing over the water.

  ‘Shepard, were you avoiding me at the press conference?’

  ‘Of course not, what makes you think that?’

  She studied his face by the moonlight.

  ‘I wouldn’t like to think that I was an embarrassment to you, professional or otherwise. I wouldn’t like to think that you had some reason to be ashamed of me, or regret something you might have done for me. I wouldn’t like that at all.’

  ‘I’m not ashamed of you. I’m not embarrassed by you.’

  ‘So when the shit starts to fly, you’ll stand by me? Because it will; this is a dangerous liaison.’

  She waded into the water, enjoying the heavy lap of it up her thighs, between her legs. She drew Shepard deeper: waist deep, chest deep.

  ‘Of course I will.’

  She pressed herself to him, undid the fastenings of his shorts.

  Her hands slipped inside his underwear, caressed his balls. He came up instantly hard. She wrapped her arms around his neck, hopped up and twined legs around his waist. ‘I’m very glad to hear that. You see, I would hate to share a refrigerator, a microwave, a music system, a shower and a bed with someone I couldn’t trust.’

  ‘You’re . . .’

  ‘Bags are back at reception.’

  ‘I love you, Gaby McAslan.’

  ‘I love you, Dr M-for-Mystery Shepard. Oh!’ Like blind deep-sea hunters, his fingers had found their way past the hem of her bleached cut-offs, under the elastic of her panties, and on to the tip of her clitoris. He smelled agreeably of sun block and beer, but she pushed herself as far away from him as her arms would allow because there was one thing to ask him and if she let him have sex with her now she would forget. ‘Shepard.’

  ‘Mm?’

  He had his shorts down.

  ‘Ooh. You bastard. That diary.’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘Do you know what happened to it? There are bits missing. Someone has been through it with a very sharp knife and cut whole pages out.’

  ‘I gave it you like I got it from Ol Tukai. If anything happened to it, it was probably there.’

  ‘But why bother, Shepard? If the missing pages refer to something UNECTA doesn’t want known, why not just lose the diary? Incinerate it, shred it?’

  ‘Don’t you ever stop being the Investigative Journalist?’

  ‘Seems not, Captain UNECTA,’ Gaby said, as she came down on top of him in the moonlit, shark-haunted water.

  ~ * ~

  33

  The first time she woke because of the strange bed.

  The second time she woke because of the strange room the strange bed was in.

  The third time she woke because of the strange dream the strange room made her have in the strange bed.

  The fourth time she woke because the videophone was cheeping at four forty-seven in the morning. She could see him in the living room, talking to the handset with his back to her. Gaby had never realized how much hair he had on his ass. She sat up in the double bed and pulled around her the tapestry of stars she had spread as a quilt. He was talking in a low voice. All she could hear were his responses to the inaudible voice of the pixelated blur on the screen.

  ‘Fallen Angel? Where? What’s the ETI? What kind of response time? Hold it. I’ll be there. Say ten minutes. And the units are already mobile to the site? It actually works. Good. The Tupolev?’ She could tell by the way his shoulders moved he was smiling. ‘No problem.’ He folded the screen and came into the bedroom.

  ‘Gab?’

  ‘I’m awake. What’s going on?’

  He put on a bedside light. It had a leather shade perforated with patterns of African animals. Antelopes and giraffes of light cantered across the walls.

  ‘Something’s come up. I have to go.’

  He was dressing rapidly. He pulled his ready bag from under the bed. Gaby drew the tapestry tighter around her, feeling uncomfortably vulnerable, abandoned naked in an unfamiliar apartment.

  ‘Go where?’

  She heard him sigh as he pulled his shirt over his head.

  ‘I can’t tell you.’

  ‘You can’t tell me.’

  ‘It’s a security issue.’

  ‘I though you trusted me. That’s what you told me that night on the beach at Addu Atoll.’

  ‘I trust you. Please don’t ask me about it, I can’t answer. This thing, it’s not just you, it’s everyone.’

  ‘How long will you be gone?’

  He pulled on bush boots, dashed to the bathroom to get those extra toiletries you always forget to put in your ready bag.

  ‘A couple of days. Maybe a week, depending.’

  ‘Depending?’

  ‘You won’t catch me out that way.’

  ‘Fair game for me to try to find out?’

  He was patting his pockets, looking distracted, trying to remember what he might have forgotten. He glanced at his watch.

  ‘Christ. The car’ll be here any minute. You do whatever you like, Gab.’ He swept up his bag up and headed for the front door. Gaby followed, swathed in needlepoint zodiac.

  ‘Shepard, haven’t you forgotten something?’

  He stopped dead.

  ‘Jesus H. Christ! Yes!’ When he turned round, he did not kiss her, which was what she had meant. He had the look of a man about to ask a vast favour. ‘Are you still officially on the leave T.P. gave you for Foa Mulaku?’

  ‘What do you want me to do with it, Shepard?’

  He took a deep breath.

  ‘I totally forgot. Totally forgot. I need you to go down to Kenyatta Airport day after tomorrow and meet my kids off the flight from LAX.’

  ‘Jesus, Shepard!’

  ‘They always come out this time of year. There’s a banda down on the coast, just north of Mombasa, at Kikambala. Take them there; you can get the key from my office. You can do this, Gaby, it’ll only be for a couple of days.’

  ‘A couple of days?’

  ‘A week at most.’

  ‘Shepard . . .’

  ‘Thanks, Gaby. I knew I could trust you.’

  The door slammed on any comment she might have made.

  ~ * ~

  34

  Gaby’s videodiary:

  August 27 2008

  I have died and gone to hell.

  People think journalism is hard. Journalism is running about getting chased by Azeri soldiers and slapped in isolation units and having to tell the finance company why you set fire to the very expensive 4x4 they lent you the money to buy and being lifted off the street by posseboys and gatecrashing society parties and living under the iron whim of T.P. Costello and flying off at a moment’s notice to the end of the world and never getting enough sleep but always having to look good for the cameras and too much coffee and never enough sex and regular mealtimes, what are regular mealtimes? cigarettes are mealtimes. Journalism is wee buns. Parenthood is hard. And long. And thankless. And comes without an off switch, a pause button, a rewind or a volume control.

  This is my bedroom at the UNECTA beach house at Kikambala. Outside, the humidity is about ninety three per cent, the temperature in the same figures, the wind is rustling the palms, the surf is crashing in the reef and whatever things creep around in the night are creeping around in the night. Including some seriously big black millipedes with red legs. This is me hiding inside my mosquito nets. Not from mosquitos. Or seriously big black millipedes with red legs, though if one gets into this room, I’ll need institutionalizing. I’m hiding from Shepard’s children. They are
the spawn of Satan.

  I’m just going to have a cigarette.

  Where to begin? Rehearsing it in arrivals at Kenyatta. Hi, you’re Fraser and Aaron, right? Your Dad’s really sorry he can’t be here to meet you, so he’s asked me to look after you and take you down to Mombasa and make sure you have a lovely time. My name’s Gaby. I’m your Dad’s live-in lover. Went over it and over it and over it as the flight data went from due to landed to in terminal until I had it by heart and they came through the door from immigration and I couldn’t remember a single word. My name: that was about all they got. They’ve probably worked out what I am.

  Adulthood edits out the trivial but significant details of being a kid, like needing to go to the jax all the time and being continuously hungry and the fact that time passes more slowly for children than for adults. I should have made sure they went in the airport. I should have bought them brunch in the cafeteria. I should not have shoved them, jet-lagged, into the Landcruiser and been past Athi River before they realized what continent they were on, let alone who I was and where I was taking them.

  Cigarette two. That bad.

  I tried my best. Honest, Shepard. I tried to talk to them, which is not that easy when at any moment some refugee’s goat might leap under your wheels, or a refugee’s child, or just a refugee. Whatever I said, it was the wrong thing. Good flight? They told me all about how the stewardess had seen they were two boys on their own and taken them up to the flight deck to see the pilots fly the plane. My best friend is a pilot for UNECTA, I say. Her name is Oksana, she flies one of those Antonovs, you know? Really good friend; how about some time I take you to see her and maybe she’ll take us up on a flight and you can see how she flies the plane, wouldn’t that be great, no?

  Silence.

  Overkill.

  I try television. I try video games. I try books, comics, movies, music, the environment. I die the death. They’ve no idea what I’m banging on about. You forget how much of what you thought was your childhood is made up of capitalist product placements and pop cultural ephemera that don’t translate from country to country, let alone generation to generation. Who was it said Britain and America are two nations divided by a common language? It’s going to be the longest five hours a girl ever spent in a 4x4.

  Down past Kathekani the road comes within a mile of terminum. They’re trying to keep the main links to the coast open as long as possible while Kenyan army engineers cut a temporary earth road ten miles to the north-east, but it’s mighty hairy. Tourists and sightseers all over the place like ants on a picnic wait to see Tsavo West cross the road, and maybe a peek at the Chaga. All the campervans and tents and buses, it’s like Ayers Rock, or the Glastonbury festival.

  ‘This is Tsavo West,’ I say to the kids, like I had produced it out of my hat. And it’s mighty impressive, looming over the city of tents and campervans and all the people who have come to watch it. ‘Your Dad used to run this place.’

  ‘We know,’ says Fraser. ‘He was Research Director.’

  ‘We know,’ says Aaron. ‘He took us here a lot of times. We know all the people there.’

  Try then to impress the guys by high-fiving with the SkyNet crew down to film the crossing. Added newsworthiness is provided by a matatu driver trying to avoid the traffic jam on the road and taking a short cut under the back left track of Tractor One. There are still folk alive in the tangle of metal: they’re bringing heavy cutting gear up from Voi by helicopter. Tsavo West has a million dollars of virtual reality manipulator system, but can’t pull a casualty out of a wreck.

  I’ll swear on whatever you like I saw Keanu Reeves in the crowd with this season’s babe-on-the-side in mandatory khaki and cute boots. I try to point him out to the boys but Aaron’s looking at the wrong person and Fraser says Keanu Reeves is a nush. I’m not sure whether this is good or bad. I am certainly not going to do anything so uncool as ask.

  After that, I think the only words spoken until Mombasa, when I had to ask them how to get to the Nyali bridge, were, ‘I need to go to the bathroom.’ And that several times. Why did God give males bladders the size of peanuts?

  Of course they know the turn off the main road at Kikambala, and which fork of the sand track through the palm trees takes you to the banda. The boys run up the steps like it’s Home Sweet Home and I unglue my knickers from the seat to which they’ve stuck and heave myself into the banda wanting drink smoke bath and ten years of solitary confinement, don’t they give you that for child murder? and the boys are in the kitchen looking at me with that dismissive yet accusing curl of the lip children instinctively know crucifies adults with assumed guilt and saying they’re hungry where’s the food?

  The food? I say. The food?

  So it’s off on foot up the beach for half a mile clambering over fallen palms and saying no politely but firmly to the shell and curio sellers to this place the boys know called the Kikambala Continental Dining Rooms where the fish is off the seafood is off the omelettes are off the salad might be off but the steak definitely is and the only thing that’s on is the curry which, astonishingly, comes complete with chapattis, chutneys, pilau rice, vegetable sambal, dhal and something so hot I still have the blisters on my gums and is the equivalent of a dollar fifty per head. I order cokes but Fraser says that when they’re on holiday Dad treats them like men and they have beer. By now I’ve learned not to argue with them, so it’s Heinekens all round. And they’re big enough to put themselves to bed, thank you very much.

  Shepard, I need you! I am lighting cigarette number three, hiding in my mosquito nets, talking to this dumb viewcam praying please, God, tell me what we can do tomorrow! I cannot take a week of this. Did you do this on purpose, you bastard?

  The door opened. Gaby leaped up, stuck her head out of the mosquito net.

  ‘Aaron?’

  He was wearing beach shorts, multi-coloured flip-flops and a most cute little Japanese bamboo pattern yukata.

  ‘Gaby, is there something wrong with us?’ He spoke like a miniature Shepard. Inflections, expressions, accent. Jimmy Stewart, the next generation.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Everything you say sounds angry.’

  ‘It what?’

  ‘Like that. It sounds like you’re mad at us, or mad at something.’

  ‘I’m not angry Aaron. I like you and Fraser fine. I don’t know very much about you yet, but what I do know I like fine. Is it my accent? Does that make me sound angry all the time? It’s just the way people talk where I come from, we don’t think anything of it because we all sound the same to each other, but yes, I think I see how it could sound harsh and abrupt and you could think I was angry. But I’m not. It’s just the way I talk. All right?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Look, I haven’t started very well, I know. I’m not awfully good at this; guys’ stuff, all that. I’m not having a great time either. I want us all to get on, but it’s just I don’t know what to do with you. Maybe you could tell me what you like to do, help me a little, here.’

  ‘Well,’ Aaron said, ‘we’d like to swim early. That’s one of the things we like to do here. Do you like to swim?’

  ‘I love to swim.’

  ‘There’s another thing we like to do, but Dad doesn’t know about it yet because we’re still learning it.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Play soccer.’

  In Gaby McAslan’s head, the crowd at Old Trafford rose as one, cheering.

  ‘That’s something I like to do very much too.’

  ‘For real?’

  ‘For really real. Aaron, there’s something you could help me out with.’

  ‘What is it?’

  Look at him standing there in his flip-flops and yukata, Gaby thought, and forgive me the betrayal I am going to ask of him.

  ‘Do you know what your Dad’s first name is? What the M. stands for?’

  ‘Yes,’ Aaron said solemnly, ‘but you must promise that if I tell you, you’ll never tell anyone el
se as long as you live, not even Dad.’

  ‘I promise. Cross my heart.’

  So he told her what the M. stood for, and Gaby McAslan kept her promise and never told anyone else as long as she lived.