Changa

by Ian McDonald

  Gaby could take in every detail in a flicker of an eyelid. The man in Arab dress was lying face down in the middle of Jogoo Road. The bomb had gone off a hundred yards further down. There was nothing left of the wooden trolley that had carried it. Three trucks were burning; one of the refugee buses was overturned. The bodies of the soldiers were scattered like chaff. Over everything hung a huge silence and slowness. Then the sound rushed into the still place after the bomb and there were screaming men and burning vehicles and yelling people.

  ‘Come on!’ Gaby shouted to her team. ‘We’ve got work to do.’

  Faraway jammed the emergency visa into Mrs Tembo’s hands and ran after Gaby.

  It was like she was a neutrino. She moved through the destroyed vehicles and the knots of shocked people without interacting with them, without being deflected by their confusion and suffering from her purpose. Soldiers pulled comrades from the tangled wrecks of vehicles; dragged shattered bodies away from pools of burning fuel. Gaby passed by. Scraps of meat and seared cloth were scraped into a gutter. Gaby sent the eye of the lens over them and moved on. Troopers comforted their screaming friends. A man sitting beside a soldier with no face shouted and shouted and shouted for a doctor to help his buddy. Combat medics triaged victims. Sirens wailed in the distance: ambulances, fire engines, fast approaching. In the middle of all, Gaby sent her camera eye probing. No one noticed her. The fire engines foamed down the burning vehicles. Ambulances, civilian and military, moved between the army trucks and disgorged trauma teams. Still no one saw Gaby and Faraway and Tembo. It was only when the military police came to seal the area that people saw there was a news team among them, filming the worst moment of their lives. Two white-helmets rounded Gaby and Faraway and Tembo up and pushed them beyond the edge of the cordon.

  ‘Fucking ghouls,’ one of the MPs said.

  Gaby did not hear him. She had seen a UN jeep arrive at the centre of the destruction. A man jumped out and was saluted by a soldier, who escorted him through the wreckage and the bodies.

  Gaby knew that man.

  ‘Shepard!’ she shouted. ‘Shepard!’

  But she could not make him hear her over the sound of the sirens and the dying.

  ~ * ~

  58

  ‘So, I must find out on the satellite news that Gaby McAslan is back in Nairobi,’ Oksana Telyanina said. The samovars still bubbled in the Elephant Bar, but a boxing ring stood where the fire pit had once burned. Framed signed photographs of woman kick-boxers competed for wall space with the icons and photographs of Russian aircraft, alongside mandalas and neo-Pagan posters. There was serious money in unlicensed kick-boxing, the Siberian woman had told Gaby. And the Elephant Bar had become the Last Chance Saloon for subcultures from all over the planet who had decided that the Chaga was their best future. Their paisley-patterned buses and dead trans-Saharan Land-rovers were piled five high in the yard across the road. Changes; even for Oksana Telyanina. Better English. Shorter hair: a quarter of an inch all over. More tattoos: her totemic tree of enlightenment had sprouted branches across her upper torso; tangling a hundred tiny iconic tattoos in its twigs. Brutal animal-print fashions that seemed to Gaby to symbolize the easy weapons and sacramental violence of Nairobi before the fall.

  ‘Do they know who did it yet?’ Oksana asked. They were at a table on the verandah, overlooking the rows of An72Fs. These and a few army helicopters on the far side of the field were all that were left; since Kenyatta had been closed to commercial traffic, all the big jets had moved there.

  ‘The Americans are trying to tell us it was some Islamic fundamentalist group, but with them its always either Islamic fundamentalists or drugs. I was there, I saw it; it was some Tactical cartel showing its rivals the UN can’t push it around. They’re getting bolder, stronger. More savage. Fifteen dead, last count.’

  ‘If you want to stay at my house, you know where the key is,’ Oksana said. ‘At least you will be safe, this is a protected area.’

  ‘Until the UN leave. Thanks, but I’m with someone else.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Faraway.’

  Oksana tried to look wise, which is not easily done when you have only a quarter of an inch of blonde stubble on your head. For a moment Gaby thought that she might be one of the kick-boxing women in the ring tonight.

  ‘And is he as good as the reputation he puts out about himself?’

  ‘He’s keen, he’s clever, he’ll try anything, he’s got great stamina, but he lacks, ah, finesse.’

  Oksana spluttered in her beer.

  ‘Candidate for Serbski Jeb?’

  Gaby suppressed a shiver. The bondage game had gone sour for her after the birthing chair in Unit 12. Be blind, be deaf, be reduced to taste, smell, touch, but be free. She would not take or give control in sex again.

  ‘He’s in love with me enough.’

  ‘But you’re not with him.’

  ‘He deserves it, but I’m not in love with him at all. It’s a bad habit I’ve picked up, sleeping with friends. I convince myself that they understand, but they always take it the wrong way and hurt gets done. It’s not love, I try to tell them; it’s touching. It’s feeling good with another. It’s wanting to wake up in the morning with another body in the bed. It’s needing something to touch me, otherwise nothing will ever touch me again. Look at me; I’m heading for thirty. I’ve got grey hairs, my metabolism’s shot to hell - once I did all my best work on a diet of alcohol, nicotine and chocolate, now I even look at food and it teleports itself into my belly - it’s a toss-up which hits the ground first, my tits or my ass, and my lifestyle won’t let me settle, let alone have anything approaching an adult relationship. So I sleep with my friends, because I can trust them and need their bodies beside me in the morning, and they all fall in love with me and come apart when they find me in bed with some other friend.

  ‘I want to have an grown-up’s relationship of edginess and compromise and having to sacrifice get things in return you never asked for and hoping that it’ll still be there beside me in the morning to touch when the hair has all gone grey and the tits have hit the ground. I want to have things demanded of me. I want to have to work at loving. I want to stop being free.’

  ‘You want Shepard,’ Oksana said. A girl waiter in boxing gear brought more beer. It was not Tusker, you could not get any of the good Kenyan beers any more, but it was cold, and at least you could imagine an elephant sauntering across the runway. ‘Big cocks and vodka!’

  Gaby returned the toast.

  ‘I saw him today at the bombing. He didn’t see me. It was like four and a half years rolled up and disappeared. I want him, I’ve never stopped wanting him, but I’m scared that if I find him, he won’t accept my apology, or me.’

  ‘It is all circles, like I told you last time we met in this place,’ Oksana said. ‘If it is taken from us, it will be returned to us some time. But to find your way back, you must first set out.’

  ‘Do you get this stuff off the insides of Christmas crackers?’ Gaby said meanly. Then, knowing she had been hurtful, she said, ‘You told me you had the gift of seeing into hearts. Look into my heart; tell me how it all fits together in there, because I don’t know any more.’

  Oksana pulled her chair around to the other side of the table, leaned forward and looked into Gaby’s eyes. The Siberian woman’s eyes were blue; Lake Baikal blue, that is the deepest blue in the world, and in a blink that was not a blink, Gaby saw the ten thousand years of tundra ice that lay behind them and empowered them. It was no shit. It had never been shit. The power was real.

  ‘You want me to do it for you,’ Oksana said. A helicopter lifted from the far side of the airfield and passed noisily over the bar. ‘I cannot be the one who lays the way. You want him to forgive you, but you fear he will not, or cannot, because it is the hope that he will, and can love you again, that is the star that has guided your life. You have changed stars, Gaby, and you do not know that yet. You are still following the old star, and it leads yo
u away. To follow this new star is to take the risk that it will fail, and your strength and trust with it. You see me and you wonder if I am another one of these people who cannot help be drawn to you and love you, and you are afraid of these people because you cannot stop yourself loving them a little. Even Faraway, who you say you do not love; you fear hurting him. You love him. You love me, but you are afraid of how I might reply to that. You must not be afraid of me. I love you, purely, and impurely, but my place is at your side and not underneath you and whatever you decide, I will honour.’

  ‘I don’t deserve you, Oksana,’ Gaby said. ‘I don’t deserve Faraway, any of you.’

  ‘We do not always get what we deserve. You see that?’ Oksana pointed at the dark horizon, away from the glow of the city. Gaby understood; she was pointing to a dim star among the constellations of the southern hemisphere: the BDO, three months from Earth. ‘If anything means that we do not get what we deserve, that does. The Chaga out there does. It is ours, if we have the courage to go into it, and take hold of it. Come on. It’s getting cold out here, and they have just started the first bout.’

  Inside the bar, the spectators were ten-deep around the ring. A Giriama woman with scarification ridges beaded across her chin and brows was kicking the living shit out of a hauntingly beautiful Indian girl with long black hair tied back in a pony tail. The men cheered and howled and laid their collars and Deutsch-marks and Krugerrands down.

  ~ * ~

  59

  She was cruising south of terminum in the shadow of the hatching towers with Faraway in a Black Simba pickni. The Black Simbas had lent Gaby a driver, a body-guard and a tail-gunner. The tail-gunner stood in the back, sweeping the avenues of middle-class villas with the swivel-mounted heavy machine gun. He called himself Cool K., and wore expensive wrap-round shades. The bodyguard was called Missaluba. She resented having to mind the m’zungu woman and her tame black cock. She wanted to be in the action up at Parklands. The driver was called Mojo. He drove frighteningly fast, because he had been told he was too old for the fighting up at Parklands.

  It was day Minus One. The Kenyan Army had fallen back in the night to positions among the Ngara and Northern Ring Roads, defending the downtown district. The United Nations were a ribbon of white and blue stretched for ten miles along the airport road. This was the first day for many weeks that you did not hear the helicopters hovering over you. They were all gone to guard the link to the airport. The northern suburbs had been abandoned and the Tacticals were dividing it up between themselves. Picknis chased each other along the tree-shaded avenues. The white plaster rendering of doctors’ and accountants’ bungalows was chipped away by bullets. Heavy armour manoeuvred through the gardens, bringing down trees, crushing children’s slides and climbing frames, cracking patios and terraces. Bodies floated in the swimming pools. Slit trenches had been dug across City Park. A primary school burned, set alight by skirmishers trying to dislodge a sniper. Only the golden arches stood from a shelled-out McDonald’s; the mortar duel had shifted focus to a Roman Catholic Church. Pitched battles were fought for strategically significant and heavily defended gas stations.

  But for old ties, Sugardaddy would not have spared Gaby the pickni and crew. He was General Sugardaddy now, of the Starehe Centre Division, with heavy and light mechanized units and infantry under his command. His orders were to spearhead the push all the way to terminum, clearing everything from his path to establish free access to the Chaga. They were half-way there already. In the night, the Starehe Division had exterminated the Soca Boys, but the Ebonettes had dug in at the end of the Murang’a Road and were resisting forcefully. The generals of the Right and Left Divisions, whose task it was to protect the flanks, were sending what troops they could spare to aid the assault, but they were coming under heavy attack from the United Christian Front to the west and the Nyayo Alliance to the east. Terminum brought the enemy fifty metres closer every day.

  While his lieutenants ordered a pickni and assembled a crew, General Sugardaddy filled out the four and a half years since Unit 12. Rose was up at the front. She did not breed Chaga dogs any more. She had command of a mechanized scouting unit. M’zee was three years gone into the Chaga.

  Sugardaddy had always thought that the old man’s heart’s true home was in that other world. He had heard that M’zee was working with the new immigrants in the Black Simba towns that were growing up ten, fifteen kilometres beyond terminum. A great nation was building in there. Perhaps M’zee’s was the greater work, in the end. Moran was dead. They had hanged him for Bushbaby’s murder. On the anniversary of the hanging, Rose went to the grave, squatted and pissed on it. And he, Sugardaddy, the king of cool, was a warrior. There were only a few now who remembered him by that name, fewer who dared to use it. He wished he could go back to the years when he was that name. He was not sure he liked to be a general, and feared.

  Gaby wondered if General Sir Patrick Lilley was ever visited by such doubts.

  ‘Since you must tell the world something, tell it the truth about us,’ Sugardaddy said. ‘It is not for greed or power or territory that we fight. It is so we can open a way to the Chaga, and hold it open so that all the people who wish to go, or have nowhere else to go, may go safely. It is our future we are fighting for. Our nation.’

  Then he drove off to war in his personal pickni. Gaby never saw him again.

  But it is still killing, she had wanted to say to him. There is no end to killing and the excuses men make for it. I have seen a dozen tiny wars like yours, General Sugardaddy, and heard the reasons men have made for them, and they are as convincing and as false as yours. The true reason is that men make war because men love it. The Chaga builders come eight hundred light years to learn what it is to be human and the bad news from Planet Earth is that men kill because it gets them wet.

  Mojo the driver was taking the pickni into the city centre now. He did it because he could. No one would stop him. No one would even look twice at him. He could drive up and down Moi Avenue, past all the other Tacticals who, anywhere else, would blow your lungs out of your back, but not here, because even carrion dogs need somewhere to sniff and lick each other’s asses. He wanted to show off to the white bitch and her piece of meat that the Black Simbas earned respect from the street. He played lecherous bumper tag with a Lambretta scooter on which two young women were riding. He would crawl up beside them, touch his tongue to his upper lip, pass. They would dart past on the inside and wrinkle their noses at him. He finally put them behind him in the traffic on City Hall Way. Beside him, Gaby watched a young beggar on a trolley push his way long the gutter. His design was resourceful - a fruit box screwed to a skateboard. Without warning, he pushed himself out in front of the pickni.

  ‘The beggar!’ Gaby shrieked. Mojo floored the brakes. The kid on the skateboard disappeared under the hood ornament that had once been one of those plastic lions rampant that the middle-class with no taste put on their gate posts. ‘Oh Christ, you’ve hit him.’

  The kid’s face rose over the top of the radiator grille. He was standing on his two feet. He was smiling. In his hands was a pump action shotgun. He threw himself flat on the hood, blew both barrels through the windscreen. Noise. Glass. Blood. Gaby screamed, thinking she was dead. The blood and meat sprayed over her right side were not hers.

  The skateboard kid rolled off the hood to cover. A Lambretta engine squealed. There were two shotgun blasts from the back of the pickni. The scooter dashed past. The girl on the back had produced a pistol grip shotgun from her backpack. She reloaded as her driver turned the scooter for another pass. The Lambretta circled the pickni, pumping shot after shot after shot into the gun position. The rear window streamed blood on both sides. Missaluba extricated her Kalashnikov from the footwell and threw open the door. The Lambretta driver kicked it closed as she sped past. Missaluba barely avoided losing fingers and face.

  A big blue Plymouth convertible drew up alongside. In it were men with Afro haircuts and big guns. The driver
and passenger covered Missaluba while the men in the back seat jumped out and hauled her down on to the concrete. The skateboard kid and the shotgun girl from the Lambretta pulled Mojo’s faceless body out of the truck and dragged Gaby over the blood-slick vinyl and shoved her into the rear seat of the Plymouth. A man in the skinniest tank top Gaby had ever seen frisked her. He tutted and shook his head at the calibre of her ammunition, like a Christian Brother teacher finding a vibrator in a schoolbag. Disapproving, but impressed. Missaluba and Faraway were kneeling by the side of the pickni. The skateboard kid and the Lambretta girl pressed shotgun muzzles to the backs of their skulls.

  ‘Take her,’ said the front seat passenger, a bald-headed man with a drooping moustache, round shades and a long leather coat. The Lambretta girl kicked Missaluba in the kidneys and quickly cuffed her hands with plastic cable grip. She went into the trunk of the big blue Plymouth.

  ‘What about him?’ the skateboard kid asked. He wanted to shoot Faraway. He wanted to shoot him very much. He wanted to blow his head up like an exploded melon, spraying red flesh and black seeds of wisdom.

  ‘Leave him,’ the leather coat said. ‘He is tribe. We go. Now.’